Pensions: Responsible Investment

Lord Harrison: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What steps they will take, in light of the recent report by FairPensions, to ensure disclosure of voting records by institutional investors and to ensure they reveal their social and environmental policies in making those investments.

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, the Government note the report's findings with interest. Current legislation already requires pension schemes to disclose both their policy on social, environmental and ethical investments and their policy on how they exercise their voting rights. However, we believe that the non-prescriptive approach to developing policies on the public disclosure of votes is the way forward, in particular the framework on voting disclosure published by the Institutional Shareholders' Committee last summer.

Lord Harrison: My Lords, according to FairPensions, the campaign for responsible investment, only two out of the top 20 UK pension funds reveal how they vote and only seven out of the 20 actually publish their strategies on environmental, social and governance issues. Given that, will my noble friend, whom I thank for the Answer, place extra pressure on pension funds to follow the voluntary codes of conduct to which they signed up, or in default of that will he use the legislation already granted to him by Parliament to oblige them to do so?

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, the Government support transparency. We encourage socially responsible investment and engagement. As my noble friend acknowledged, there is legislation covering statement of investment principles, and if that is not complied with it would be a matter for the Pensions Regulator. I think my noble friend would acknowledge that progress has been made. The FairPensions report itself acknowledges that. The Institutional Shareholders' Committee report indicates that since June 2002 there has been a dramatic increase in the number of UK institutional investors reporting votes—53 per cent of UK equities managed by UK institutional investors—but the effectiveness of that will be subject to review next year. And, of course, we have the NAPF review of Myners, on which the Government have agreed to consult. There is a whole collection of things going on. The position is improving but there is more to do.

Lord Stewartby: My Lords, I accept that the noble Lord's Question is well intentioned, but will the Government be very careful in planning any further steps in this area, bearing in mind that public companies already have to comply with an enormous range of information and other governance requirements? The last thing one wants to do is to increase the bureaucratic burden with which they have to deal.

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, as I have explained, the Government believe that a voluntary principle-based approach to encouraging socially responsible investment is the way forward. That is broadly the structure at the moment and certainly builds on the recommendations of the Institutional Shareholders' Committee. We want a review of that to see how effective it will be. I think that is the right way forward. At the end of the day, there is rightly legislation and we expect pension schemes to comply with that.

Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the training of employee trustees is important in that connection, and can anything be done about that?

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, I very much agree with my noble friend. The role of trustees, particularly member-appointed trustees, is very important. The Pensions Regulator has some very good material and proposals concerning training. We believe that it is the job of individual schemes to devise precisely how that training should be undertaken, but it is a very important issue.

Lord Razzall: My Lords, as the Minister will be aware, it has been common ground on all sides of the House that the framework that he describes, under which there is a legislative stick but a voluntary carrot, is the correct way to proceed. Is the noble Lord prepared to give an indication of the timing of the Government's review and when they will decide whether the voluntary system is working?

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, we have asked the ISC to undertake a review and to report by the autumn of this year. That is a relatively short timeframe, but I think it is reasonable, given that it was only in June of last year that those recommendations were put in place.

Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, more and more investors in pensions and other investors in this country are becoming exercised about ethical funds, as I am sure the Minister will agree. Therefore, can he tell us whether the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority is likely to set up an ethical pension fund?

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, I agree that there is increasing focus on ethical investment, which is a thoroughly good thing. On the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority, it will be for the trustees of the scheme to determine the investment policy, taking account of the usual considerations. But the noble Lord will recall the White Paper that preceded the legislation that we are going through which I think certainly indicated that in the research suggested there was quite an appetite for ethical investment. Therefore, it is to be hoped that that would feature as part of the scheme, but it is not for Government to dictate.

Lord Harrison: My Lords, does my noble friend acknowledge that those firms with pension funds that indeed maximise disclosure are the most successful financially?

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, I understand that evidence suggests—these are not government data—that ethical investment also produces a very healthy and at least a comparable, if not better, return than non-ethical investment. It seems to me that that is an added bonus to the whole approach.

Allotments

Baroness Sharples: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	How many allotments have been lost over the past 10 years; and whether any new allotments have been established in the same period.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, in the past 10 years, there have been disposals affecting 580 statutory allotment sites in England. We do not require local authorities to provide figures for the disposal of temporary or private allotments and it is a matter for local authorities to determine levels of provision to meet communities' needs.

Baroness Sharples: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Would she perhaps consider revising guidance to officers who are concerned with this area so that allotment holders can feel confidence in their dealings with local councils? There are also waiting lists in many areas and concern that exchange allotments may be much smaller and so not viable.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I know that the noble Baroness is a vigilant critic of government allotment policy. I am very pleased that we have seen a revival of allotments in this country and we are doing all we can to protect that. The noble Baroness is quite right. We have very robust legislation. Allotments are uniquely protected in law as green space and have been for a century, but we find that allotment officers often do not know the law and do not know how to apply it properly. We are revising guidance with the LGA and it will be available very shortly—in the spring.

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: My Lords, are the Government concerned that in many parts of the country we have allotments that are overgrown and unworked, particularly in the south-east—I come from the Brighton area where we have a substantial number that fall into that category—yet we are desperately short of land for housing, particularly social housing? Is it not time that we had a flexible approach on some of these issues?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, the noble Lord is quite right. Part of the problem is that allotments fall into disrepair and become an easier target. To address that we recently put out help for allotment-holders warning them about this. We have also invested in the allotments regeneration initiative, which is a collection of extremely experienced and passionate people who provide direct help for allotment officers and allotment holders. The noble Lord should be aware that under our planning policy—PPG 17 in particular—there is no provision for building on allotments. We have to audit our open public space, protect it and make sure that if we do build on it, it is surplus to requirements. The law provides that.

Lord Dixon-Smith: My Lords, I am well aware of the problem identified by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe. That said, the allocation of any land within any built area—I use that term so that I do not fall into the trap of urban areas perhaps not including villages—is always a very difficult local issue. Surely the sacrifice of any of that land should always be a last resort rather than, as it sometimes appears, the first instance that people look at.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, our planning policy statement on open space and, most recently, our planning policy statement on housing—PPS 3—made it absolutely clear that new housing development should not be at the expense of open space and that an allotment should not be built on unless it is clearly shown to be surplus to local requirements. Having said that, it is important to bear in mind the fact that by no means all allotment loss goes on housing or development. About a third of allotments go for enhanced green space, which is a very good thing.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, does the Minister accept that although there has been a great revival of interest there has certainly not been a revival of provision? In London, as well as in many other cities, the chances of getting an allotment plot are so bad that you will get a graveyard plot before an allotment?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, there is an issue about providing equivalence in terms of allotments. Allotment officers need to know that if they provide alternatives they have to be of equal quality. London has a particular problem because it is managed slightly differently. When we consider the relative loss of allotments—182,000 since the high point of the war over the period to 1997, and only 10,000 statutory plots lost since 1997—we have stopped the rot. There is a lot of optimism about getting a plot these days.

The Countess of Mar: My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that an interest in growing things, enjoying the fresh air and taking physical exercise needs to be fostered in the very young for it to be carried on into adult life? Will she say what Her Majesty's Government are doing to encourage youngsters—six and seven year-olds—outside school to grow their own things, watch them growing, and to eat them when they have grown?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, many encouraging things are happening. For example, there is a growth of gardening clubs in schools. A lot of the allotments—I was at one in Dorset Road in Bromley the other day—have connections with schools and encourage people from all over the community. It is interesting to see the different sorts of things that are grown by different members of the community. For example, in St James's Park this year we had a wartime plot, which made a link with the history of wartime growing. It was absolutely fabulous—the biggest cabbages you have ever seen in your life; they were perfect. A lot of young people were involved in that as well.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, having been responsible for allotments as a member of the GLC, I was aware that outer London had allotments but that inner London was not expected to provide any. Can the noble Baroness say whether the same applies to other large cities or whether London was unique?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, the noble Baroness is quite right. London is a special case. I do not think it is under a duty to provide allotments in the same way as other parts of the country. Arrangements are reached with other boroughs. I am fairly certain I am correct about that but I shall write to the noble Baroness with more detail. There was a report in 2006 on London allotments, which looked at the waiting list.

Baroness Tonge: My Lords, have the Government made any assessment of the amount of dangerous asbestos in allotment sheds up and down the country? This is very expensive for the allotment owner to remove. Do local councils have any guidance on this issue? I declare an interest as the part-owner of a very dodgy allotment shed.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, the noble Baroness is, unfortunately, in rather good company as the owner of a dodgy allotment shed. I have absolutely no briefing on asbestos and garden sheds. I can only apologise to the noble Baroness. I am sure there is somebody in my department whose speciality is precisely that kind of thing. I will find them and get back to the noble Baroness.

Lord Elton: My Lords, reverting to the problem of overgrown allotments, is it not the case that every allotment requires some very heavy digging, at least once a year? This may be what discourages some older members of society from keeping their allotments in apple pie order. Is this not very suitable, heavy, productive and instructive work for those serving community service orders?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, as my noble friend says, it is better than going to the gym; he is probably right. What I have found interesting as I have toured these allotments is the number of young people there, particularly young mothers who want to grow their own food because of a preoccupation with healthy eating. A lot of mentoring by older members of the allotment societies on how to care for the plot goes on. It involves a lot of hard work, which is something that we all have to learn.

Road Safety

Lord Dubs: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether they have any new initiatives to improve road safety.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, there is an up-to-date overview in the second three-year review of our Road Safety Strategy, published in February. Examples of forthcoming initiatives include a fundamental review of driver training and testing, a safety-rating scheme for motorcycle helmets and a consultation on how we can help to improve drink-drive enforcement. The strategy review contains all these initiatives and much more.

Lord Dubs: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for what he said. I declare an interest as I have just become chair of the Road Safety Foundation. Does my noble friend agree that in 2000 Britain had the best record in Europe for low-death rates on our roads? Since then we have slipped to sixth place in the European league. Does he agree that in addition to tackling driver behaviour and vehicle safety, a small expenditure on the infrastructure of our roads has been shown to lead to significant drops in death and serious injury? Would he look further at the potential for improving our infrastructure in low-cost schemes to achieve that end?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on his appointment. If today is anything to go by, he will be assiduous in following up these issues. It is more a case of the other countries catching us up. My information is that only Sweden, the Netherlands and Malta have safer roads than us. Certainly, over the last 10 years deaths and serious injuries are down by 33 per cent, over headline figures going back to 1994-98. The noble Lord is right to say that making small improvements to road schemes—the engineering, as it were—can bring big rewards. We have a very good record on road safety; we need to continue to build on our earlier successes.

Lord Hanningfield: My Lords, I would like the noble Lord to comment on the particular statistic that must concern us most of all: over 20 per cent of accidents and 25 per cent of deaths involve males under 25. Should the Government not do more and look more closely at that category of young people?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, we do, and have been doing, much more. The noble Lord is right to highlight the deaths of young people on the roads. Young people and, of course, the elderly, are most vulnerable. But child deaths and serious injuries are down by 52 per cent over the last decade, which is testament to the hard work that has been put in through enforcement. We have increased fixed-penalty fines for seatbelt offences by some 20 per cent. There has been a 70 per cent increase in fixed penalties for the use of mobile phones, and a 5 per cent increase in breath tests over the period from 2004 to 2005. We continue to bear down on these issues, but there is always more that we can do.

Noble Lords: My Lords—

Baroness Boothroyd: Cross Bench!

Lord Rooker: My Lords, we should hear from the noble Lord, Lord Low.

Lord Low of Dalston: My Lords, the Minister will be aware of the grave concern expressed by visually impaired and other disabled people about the creation of so-called shared-space schemes in town centres and other public spaces. These schemes create a free-for-all in which motorists, cyclists and pedestrians are expected to share the same space and negotiate priority and right of way by eye contact. Will the Government take steps to halt all further development of such schemes and have existing schemes dismantled until reliable means can be found of ensuring that blind, disabled, elderly and other vulnerable pedestrians can negotiate such areas in safety? If not, what steps will the Government take to ensure that shared space initiatives do not have a deleterious effect on the road safety and independence of disabled and other vulnerable pedestrians?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Lord makes an important intervention. I know that shared-space schemes are controversial. The notion has been imported into our own thinking. Motorists seem rather keener on it than pedestrians. For understandable reasons, pedestrians should be very concerned. We must rightly keep these issues under review, but the noble Lord's strong words of caution are absolutely right.

Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, to return to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, there is increasing death and lack of safety among drivers under 25. This is attributed to the fact that the wearing of seat belts is very lax among that group. Will the Minister consider making the non-wearing of a seat belt an endorsable offence, as it is in Northern Ireland, as a means of reducing this needless waste of life?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Lord makes a good point; it is something we actively review. I certainly understand and share his concern.

Baroness Sharples: My Lords, can the Minister say whether I am within my rights when, at a pedestrian crossing, a cyclist rides straight at me when I have the lights in my favour? I swiped one with a bag the other day. Would I be in trouble?

Noble Lords: Oh!

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I wonder whether I should—no, I will be careful on this. I am a great admirer of the noble Baroness, and I think she probably did the right thing.

Lord Tomlinson: My Lords, while recognising that the best bicyclists on our roads—I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn—are very good, will my noble friend accept that there is an increasing hazard on our roads caused by cyclists who do not believe that the existing laws apply to them? Can he ensure that serious attention is given to the necessity of wearing front lights, having rear reflectors and regarding traffic lights as something more than decorative as far as our two-wheeled road users are concerned?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I live in a city where cycling is a popular pastime. Over the years in which I have been involved in public life in Brighton, I have had many complaints of a similar nature to those which the noble Lord has brought to the attention of your Lordships' House this morning. I entirely understand what he is saying, and his words are well meant. Of course I will reflect this back to the department.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, will the Minister's review also look at the deaths sadly caused to motorcyclists, particularly on rural roads? There are more deaths on rural roads than on the big urban roadways. Also, will the review take into account the use of sat-navs these days which, instead of sending drivers down the main roads, send them down a lot of country roads, causing a lot of damage to some and adding to the likelihood of accidents?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Baroness raises an important issue. Sat-navs can send out the wrong signals. We see problems, particularly with motorcyclists, on the more minor roads. Of course, we keep these things carefully under review. Perhaps that is something for us to work on more with those who provide the sat-nav intelligence and a further discussion that we should have.

Lord Wedderburn of Charlton: My Lords—

Lord Rooker: My Lords, we are in the 24th minute; we must move on.

Airports: Luggage

Lord Dykes: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether they will take urgent action to persuade United Kingdom airports and carriers to adopt a single onboard luggage policy.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, 22 airports have been given permission to lift the one-bag rule, having demonstrated sufficient screening capacity while also maintaining our security standards. We expect all airports to be ready in due course. Cabin-bag policy is an operational matter for individual airlines.

Lord Dykes: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. Choice and competition are important and this is a private sector matter, yet security pressures and just plain common sense indicate that an official or government-led initiative would bring results here. Airport passengers and travellers are already bullied, harassed and overstressed, and they find it hard to get through these difficult circumstances, particularly in large airports such as Heathrow. Would it not make sense for everybody to know that the same limit applies, particularly for short-haul flights in economy class?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I understand the noble Lord's point, but we made it plain at the outset when we implemented the one-bag rule back in November 2006 that we hoped that it would not be for a lengthy period. Of course passengers want to be able to take more of their close personal possessions on to aircraft, which is why we have relaxed the restriction. Since the announcement was made and implemented in the 22 airports that have been given permission to lift the one-bag rule, things so far appear to be working pretty well. The simple advice that I would give to passengers at different airports is to check with their airlines what restrictions apply and how the airline is intending to operate them.

Lord Trimble: My Lords, is it simply a coincidence that the restrictive one-bag rule is being retained in all airports in Northern Ireland?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the baggage restrictions will be relaxed where an airport can match the standard of being able to carry out effective and efficient checks on bags with the new technology and so on. That will happen once we have made an assessment and are satisfied that the airport can conduct its security checks with proper care.

Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, to go back to the Minister's first Answer, there is a wide range between what appears to be acceptable on one airline and what appears to be acceptable on another. Is enforcement a matter for the individual airline or is it in accordance with rules laid down by the Civil Aviation Authority?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, it is for the airport itself to carry out the security checks. Individual airlines operate different policies. For instance, both easyJet and Ryanair had a one-bag rule before we introduced the security measures back in 2006, presumably for what they considered to be the best commercial reasons.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, women wish to have a handbag for their possessions. They do not automatically have all the pockets that men have and they need to be able to carry their passport and things in a handbag. Under the one-bag restriction, you have been obliged to put your handbag inside whatever other bag you have, which has been extremely inconvenient, to say the least. I thought that the one-bag airlines, such as Ryanair, had always allowed women to carry a handbag as well; I do not think that it had to be included in your one bag in the past.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I am trying to think back to the last time I used Ryanair—

A noble Lord: Carrying a handbag?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: I was coming to that point, my Lords. I was about to say that my dearly beloved partner is of course a handbag carrier—and don't I know it. The noble Baroness may well be right, but I will check.

Lord Bilimoria: My Lords, the noble Lord's Question is about on-board luggage. I declare an interest, having arrived at Heathrow this morning from India. Given the state of facilities at Heathrow at the moment, you are lucky even to get on board. In spite of the fact that Terminal 5 will soon come on board, what will the Government do to improve the facilities at Heathrow? Heathrow is in many cases the global airport, and it affects our competitiveness. Yet, whether in baggage handling or any other aspect, it is deteriorating rapidly.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, that question has much exercised your Lordships in the past. Of course, it is something that BAA at Heathrow is working on. BAA is improving facilities; it has an improvement programme that runs to 2012, and I know that it is keen to continue with that upgrade. I understand that some facilities at Heathrow have improved during the past few months. Let us hope that that improvement continues. To go back to the main subject of the Question, at Heathrow the rule on hand luggage has been relaxed, and passengers are now able to take on two items of hand luggage.

Lord Lawson of Blaby: My Lords, the Minister mentioned new technology. When will the technology have developed to the extent that it is able to distinguish between a bottle of Armagnac and a bottle of high explosive, so that, living in Armagnac as I do, I will be able to bring a bottle of Armagnac into this country as hand baggage?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, perhaps when it gets to that point the noble Lord will share the Armagnac with others in your Lordships' House.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, with the permission of the House, a Statement will be repeated later today on UK energy policy. It will be delivered by my noble friend Lord Jones of Birmingham, and we shall take it between the two debates; that is, after the debate being introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace.
	While I am on the subject of Statements, may I offer one passing thought to the House? I have received, as have others, I am sure, a few complaints lately that the 20 minutes of Back-Bench contributions to Statements enable only a small number of people to contribute. That must partly be due to the length of ministerial responses, about which we will do our best, but it is also due to the length of Back-Bench questions or comments. After one recent Statement, there were only five Back-Bench contributions in the 20 minutes. I just offer a little homily to the House that perhaps we can improve on that.

Earl Ferrers: My Lords, is it not a fact that, when Statements are made, the opposition parties can reply by making a speech but Back-Benchers are supposed only to ask questions?

Lord Grocott: Yes, my Lords. I took the precaution of bringing the Companion with me, which states that,
	"although brief comments and questions from all quarters of the House are allowed, statements should not be made the occasion for an immediate debate".
	That is a rather long-winded way of saying, "Keep it short".

Business of the House: Debates Today

Lord Rooker: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Ashton on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the debate on the Motion in the name of Lord Wallace of Saltaire set down for today shall be limited to three hours and that in the name of Lord Greaves to two hours.—(Lord Rooker.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Armed Forces: US Missile Defence

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: rose to call attention to the United Kingdom's commitment to participate in the United States missile defence system, and to the implications of recent negotiations between the United States and other states for the deployment of that system; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, the context for this debate is provided by the Government's commitment to participate in the United States missile defence system, slipped out in a Written Statement one day before Parliament rose last July. Since then, the Government have offered no opportunity to debate this decision in either House; despite the promise that Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, made in the other place last February that:
	"We will tell the House as soon as there is something to say. At the moment those discussions are at a very preliminary stage ... When we have a proposition to put, we will come back and put it".
	He was forced to say that only because the Economist had just published an article detailing negotiations under way between the UK and the US in Washington, based on Washington sources.
	Mr Blair also promised that when a decision was made there would be a,
	"discussion in the House and, indeed, outside the House".—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/07; col. 919-920.]
	No such discussion has yet taken place. We therefore offer the Lords the opportunity to consider Her Majesty's Government's acceptance that the US will install new equipment at Menwith Hill, in addition to switching on the enhanced radar at RAF Fylingdales, in the hope that the Government will be sufficiently embarrassed to provide a fuller and more detailed justification of their decision, and to grant time for an appropriate debate also in the other place.
	We are not, as a party, opposed in all circumstances to the concept of missile defence—no more than we are opposed in desperate circumstances to nuclear weapons, dreadful as they are. We are however committed to a multilateral approach to international security and to the development of a treaty-based framework for controlling and reducing the world's dependence on armaments, most of all nuclear weapons. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s an extensive multilateral framework was constructed for limiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the treaty to ban weapons in outer space and the 1972 bilateral US-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This framework has sadly been significantly weakened over the past seven years by the actions of the Bush Administration.
	The case for a more determined effort to build a multilateral regime to control fissile materials and to reverse the proliferation of nuclear weapons was strongly argued in an article jointly signed by George Shultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn in the Wall Street Journal on 4 January last year—not a group of lily-livered liberals but hard-headed and experienced American statesmen who recognise that a stronger global framework to end what they called "the nuclear madness" is essential. In that context, some precautionary research on the long-term possibilities of missile defence, in case efforts at multilateral regime-building fail, is justifiable—but not a rush to deployment.
	That was, until 2001, the position of the Labour Government. When the Republican majority in Congress attempted to push President Clinton towards a programme of national missile defence in 1999-2000, Peter Hain, as a Foreign Office Minister, declared:
	"I don't like the idea of a Star Wars programme, limited or unlimited. Unilateral moves by Washington would be very damaging";
	while Geoff Hoon, as Secretary of State for Defence, expressed concern that such a development would breach the ABM treaty, telling the Commons,
	"we continue to value the strategic stability that the treaty provides. We want to see it preserved".—[Official Report, Commons, 4/5/00; col. 312.]
	An alternative, unilateral approach to missile defence has been a core element of the ideology of the American Republicans for the past 30 years, supported vigorously by the companies that form America's military-industrial complex and which have benefited so well from the enormous expenditure on the Star Wars programme over the years. When President Reagan promoted the strategic defence initiative in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, to her great credit, used her personal relationship with him to insist that the SDI programme must remain compatible with existing arms control agreements, including the ABM treaty.
	After the Cold War ended, the programme was scaled back, and scaled back further when the Democrats under Clinton recaptured the White House. But neo-conservatives and other believers in American exceptionalism kept the faith and declared their willingness to tear up arms control treaties to achieve it. This is, after all, an essential part of the project for a new American century: to establish global American hegemony behind a secure missile shield, unconstrained by treaties or by unreliable allies. The Rumsfeld Commission in 1998 encouraged the Republican Congress to push national missile defence forward; and the US Air Force Space Command, for which much of the additional funding was provided, developed proposals for the potential militarisation of outer space in response, which would break another pillar of the arms control regime.
	It is astonishing how completely our Labour Government—a supposedly progressive Government committed in principle to international law, multilateral institutions and the limitation of armaments—have since caved in to the neo-conservative Bush agenda. In February 2001, Prime Minister Blair told Forbes magazine that the missile defence issue needed to be marked "handle with care" in Washington. By the autumn of 2002, the MoD, in a public discussion paper, cautiously indicated:
	"The Government will agree to a US request for the use of UK facilities for missile defence only if we believe that doing so enhances the security of the UK and the NATO alliance".
	In January 2003, Mr Hoon announced that Her Majesty's Government had agreed to upgrading the Fylingdales radar, telling the Commons that this,
	"should be considered as a discrete proposition. It does not commit us in any way to any deeper involvement in missile defence".—[Official Report, Commons, 15/1/03; col. 697.]
	He did, however, admit to Sir Menzies Campbell that the Government had not discussed this decision with any of our major European partners—so much for ensuring that it would strengthen the NATO alliance. Over the past few months the German Government in particular have asked for much more multilateral discussion about the current proposed deployment of US missile defence across Europe, but the British Government have not responded to the German Government on that.
	In January 2003, in recognising that there were some arguments for upgrading Fylingdales, the Commons Defence Committee said:
	"Further steps down the path towards a UK missile defence capability, however, will require a more robust justification couched more directly in terms of our own national interest. Future upgrades will have to be judged on their merits at the time".
	Amid persistent rumours that the Government were negotiating with Washington for a major role in the US system, Des Browne assured the Commons as late as April last year that:
	"The UK has received no request from the US to use RAF Menwith Hill for missile defence-related activities".—[Official Report, Commons, 16/4/07; col. 162W.]
	That must have been a misleading statement. Formal letters on the use of Menwith Hill were exchanged only two months later, although Parliament was not informed for several more weeks to avoid embarrassment to the Government.
	Noble Lords may not be familiar with the exact status of Menwith Hill. I have a particular interest because this American base is sited on the ridge between Wharfedale and Nidderdale, and I see its multiple sensors and radars on the horizon—in their giant golfball cladding—every time I walk up from Saltaire onto Ilkley Moor. Unlike Fylingdales, which is operated by the RAF, Menwith Hill is under American control. It is a field station of the US National Security Agency. It has been described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. Between 1,500 and 2,000 US nationals from various agencies work at the base. Contacts in Harrogate council tell me that numbers rose by several hundred in the months after September 11 2001, although that was unreported to the British Parliament.
	I hope that the Minister can enlighten us on the exact status of this base. As I understand it, it was granted to the United States under a bilateral exchange of letters in December 1951, and a 21-year lease was confirmed by a further exchange of letters in 1955. In 1976, when the first 21-year period was up, the Pentagon admitted that it had lost the original exchange of letters. Nevertheless, the MoD granted a further 21-year occupation until 1997. In February 1997, Nicholas Soames, as a Conservative Minister, stated:
	"There is one security of tenure agreement applicable solely to RAF Menwith Hill. No leases have ever been granted to the US authorities".
	He went on to say that,
	"there are no plans, nor is there any requirement, to renew the arrangements at RAF Menwith Hill".—[Official Report, Commons, 24/2/97; cols. 118-19.]
	Nevertheless, the base is still very much there, serving American interests on British soil. Noble Lords will remember the European Parliament inquiry several years ago which investigated the Echelon programme when it was said that Americans were being allowed to listen in on European communications and to feed back commercial as well as security information to the US authorities and the companies with which they had close relationships. The British Government at the time had no comment to make on these investigations. My good friend Norman Baker MP has tried without success through successive parliamentary questions to discover exactly what the terms are under which the US NSA now occupies and operates this base.
	Over the coming months we will hear a great deal in both Houses and in the British press about the limitations to British sovereignty involved in ratifying the EU reform treaty. But the abandonment of British sovereignty involved in the operation of Menwith Hill—and of course also in the more distant Diego Garcia—presents a far deeper incursion into British sovereignty than anything the EU has to offer. The ministerial Statement of 25 July 2007 stated clearly that,
	"at RAF Menwith Hill, equipment will be installed and operated by the US Government [to feed data] ... into the US ballistic missile ... system for use in their response to any missile attack on the US".—[Official Report, Commons, 25/7/07; col. 71WS.]
	This is Britain as "Airstrip One" for a hegemonic USA, not the basis for a co-operative partnership among allies. It seems appropriate that Menwith Hill should have appeared in a slide map presented by an official from the US Missile Defence Agency to the WEU Assembly in December last year in military newspeak as the "UK situational awareness node". An even clearer indication of Labour's subservience to the Rumsfeld-Cheney agenda was the Defence Secretary's use of the term "rogue states" in his 25 July Statement in order to explain "the emerging threat" which this US system is intended to counter.
	Do the Government really believe that there are states beyond the reach of international pressure or diplomacy that presently constitute existential threats—an axis of evil against which only a military response is possible? In January 2003 Mr Hoon justified the upgrading of Fylingdales in terms of the threat from Iraq, but the threat was then defeated and discovered to be rather insubstantial. Some Washington policy makers then were more focused on North Korea; but the United States has, sensibly, shifted towards a multilateral effort to contain North Korea through sanctions and negotiations. Libya used to be on the list; but successful British and American diplomacy has persuaded Libya to dismantle its nuclear programme. Now it is Iran which is called on to justify the project, assumed to remain an implacable enemy over the 10 to 20 years needed to get the system up and running and justify its cost.
	Why has there been so little public concern about this in Britain so far? Well, the Conservatives have given their unconditional support to this neo-conservative project, so also giving the Government a free pass from proper parliamentary scrutiny. William Hague, the MP for a constituency that neighbours on Menwith Hill as well as Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, replied to one of his own constituents last October with the robust declaration:
	"Conservatives are fully supportive of the principle of a Missile Defence system in Europe, which, as you say, includes the facility at Menwith Hill ... We encourage future cooperation with the United States on defence and security related issues".
	We might expect the Conservatives to support this essentially Republican project, even if it marks a sad retreat from the traditional Tory support for multilateralism and international institutions. What is extraordinary is that the Labour Party has been so silent on this betrayal by its own Government of traditional internationalist principles. In the American presidential campaign, it has been Rudy Giuliani and John McCain who have made missile defence a major theme in their campaigns. Both of them have made it clear that they see the system as aimed at containing Russia as well as emerging nuclear states, and that they do not care if further development worsens our already difficult relations with Putin's Russia. But, as my noble friend Lady Williams will argue later, we need Russia as a partner in strengthening the global arms control regime, and in tightening controls over trade in fissile materials and nuclear components.
	The Economist story last February reported, on good authority, that our then Prime Minister, with the support of our then Chancellor, was pressing the American Administration to station not only sensors, radars and communications networks in Britain, but also missile interceptors. In the event, Washington chose to place the interceptors in Poland rather than in Britain, with additional radar facilities in the Czech Republic. A change of government in Poland has since thrown this in doubt, with the robustly right-wing Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, bluntly stating,
	"this is an American, not a Polish project",
	which jeopardises Polish relations with Russia unnecessarily.
	On 8 October, the Daily Telegraph reported that the British Government were still pursuing negotiations for closer involvement; that—quoting a Foreign Office spokeswoman—
	"missile defence would be one of Sir Nigel Sheinwald's top priorities"
	when he took up his post as UK ambassador in Washington; and that the likeliest site for a UK missile interceptor base would be at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. Well, at least that makes a change from placing everything in Yorkshire. Can the Minister possibly assure us that in the event of the new Polish Government declining to accept these missiles, the Government will not leap into the gap to accept them instead?
	Foreign Minister Sikorski raised another query about current US plans in his interview last week, reported in Monday's International Herald Tribune. He said that,
	"he was worried that the United States could abandon the project after the American presidential election in November",
	leaving Poland to carry the costs of a deterioration in relations with Russia without any gain in longer-term security. The same fate could of course meet our Labour Government, to find themselves—after years of subordinating their principles to Republican unilateralism—faced with a Democratic President who thankfully prefers a multilateral course. I, for one, hope that that indeed will be the outcome. But in the mean time, this House, and this Parliament, deserves a much fuller justification from the Government of the commitments on the use of British soil for US missile defence than they have given over the years. The British public deserve that explanation, too. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Giddens: My Lords, since I am the first to respond I am happy to be the first to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on having initiated this debate on what is manifestly a fundamentally important topic. To begin with, I should say that I have very considerable disquiet about how the Government have approached this issue and its wider implications. Many points can be made about this and I am sure that they will be made by other speakers. I will not discuss whether the thing will work because I find it impossible to conceive that a failsafe anti-missile system could be constructed. You would need a hell of a lot of trust in it to sit underneath it while someone launched a missile at you. I want to raise three points which to some extent overlap with those made by the noble Lord.
	First, I turn to the manner in which the decision was taken by the Government on further involvement with the US missile system. As they say of marriage, it left a lot to be desired. The Defence Select Committee said:
	"We deplore the manner in which the public debate on this issue has been handled".
	That is a strong statement. The Government responded to it by saying, "Oh well, we have had quite a bit of consultation with different interest groups". But that is not the same as having a proper public debate on the issues, so I agree fairly strongly with what the noble Lord said about that.
	The other countries involved in the missile shield are Poland and the Czech Republic, both of which at least were governed by far-right Administrations. It is quite significant that the new Polish Government have started to make different noises from those of the previous Administration about their involvement. A YouGov survey in this country showed that only 26 per cent of the population thought that our involvement with the missile shield might make either the UK or Europe safer, and the percentages against it in the Czech Republic and Poland are considerably higher, at around 70 per cent. Therefore maybe this should have been a more substantial debate given that, at least in those parts of the European Union affected by the shield and that have agreed to go along with it, the weight of public opinion is against it.
	Secondly, the literature the Government have published on the missile shield seems consistently to downgrade its importance. They speak of an upgrade in our radar protection system. Of course, in a technical sense it is an upgrade because it is in large part a modification of what we already have, but in a wider sense it is very different from that. As the noble Lord also said, the initial introduction of the missile shield was made against the backdrop of one of the most significant shifts in international relations that we have seen for the past 30 to 40 years. Most noble Lords, and I am sure most noble Lords present, will have read President Bush's address made at West Point in 2001, not long after the attack on New York, where he said that he would define the world primarily in terms of American power, that America would be the dominant state in world society, and that he did not intend to go along with the multilateral agreements which have existed so far. Even before that, the United States had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so the existence of this project is quite interlocked with—I do not like the word "neoconservativism", which is a sort of scare term—a fundamental shift in international relations in which, if I understand the position of Prime Minister Brown's Government, to whom I now belong, there is a return to multilateral negotiations. There is a clear inconsistency here.
	Thirdly, the Government say blandly that they will work on further co-operation with the EU and NATO, but the decision to take part in this endeavour is one fraught with implications for the whole of Europe and beyond. When the Minister in the other place was asked about the effects of this, he said that it would make Britain a safer place. But if it creates a belligerent and hostile Russia on the edge of Europe, in what sense are we in a safer place? We all know that Russia's response to the missile shield has been consistently hostile. The latest statement, made yesterday by the Russian Foreign Minister, reiterates the position taken previously, so you cannot pretend that this decision does not have very wide geopolitical implications.
	I ask the Minister three questions. First, would she accept that the siting of installations here marks a distinct loss of UK sovereignty? I do not mean this question in the same way as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked it, because I do not think that the issue here is who controls the base—whether you have an American commander or British control. I take it that this Government will have sovereignty over what goes on inside the base, but will we not lose sovereignty in terms of wider decision-making? If we get involved with an installation, we are involved necessarily in a wide project whose parameters will be sketched by the large-scale powers, not by the UK—by America, Russia and, it is my hope, anyway, the European Union and maybe China. I cannot see that the UK will have a significant impact on something that it has committed itself to. Therefore, it seems a loss of sovereignty in a rather broader and more significant sense than the noble Lord sketched in.
	Secondly, how would the Minister counter the argument that the introduction of a missile shield, or a missile shield project, inevitably brings a strong possibility of further confrontation, and further escalation in the existence of missile systems and hostile arrangements of armaments in the world? Russia has already said that it is producing a missile system with multiple warheads, more sophisticated than those that have existed for some years previously, and which it says will outwit any possible missile shield. How can one prevent further escalation—if you like, a renewed arms race—in which Europe again might be the pawn, caught in the middle, if such an escalation should happen? I think that the Government at least owe us an explanation of why this would not be the outcome of the project in which they are involving us.
	Thirdly and finally, if there is indeed to be a new missile system—and unlike the noble Lord, I am not a fundamentalist; I am not against the idea in principle, under certain conditions—it would manifestly be safer if Russia, the EU and the United States collaborated on it. Russia, of course, has set out a plan, which the American President has straightforwardly rejected. My final question is: does the Minister see a way in which Russia could be involved, and in which therefore there could be a missile shield that would indeed protect us all, because it would be based on a multilateral set of agreements, rather than the international relations regime that the Bush Government have perpetrated?

Lord Marlesford: My Lords, we owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for enabling us to debate an extremely important matter. I will not repeat the interesting points that he made about how this system evolved, nor will I address the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, save to express some surprise at his great concern over sovereignty in this matter. The issue of sovereignty in the matter of collaboration with the United States over defence has not been a real problem for the great majority of us for a very long while. I personally do not see any difference between what is now proposed in terms of sovereignty and what has been happening for a long while.
	I believe that the debate about missile defence must be seen in the historical context of modern warfare. For this purpose, I define the start of modern warfare as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. It must also be seen in the context of missile offence, and on this I suppose history goes back a year earlier, to September 1944, when Hitler launched his V2 rockets on London. Indeed, if one is talking about the essence of modern warfare technologically, one sees that the crucial development was that of radar, by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, which took place in Suffolk, near where I live, in 1938 and which arrived just in time to save Britain in the battle against the Luftwaffe.
	There is still much criticism of the American atomic attack on Japan. One of my early schoolboy memories is hearing the Emperor of Japan, translated on the radio, denouncing the use of this "new and most cruel" weapon. Even as a juvenile, I thought it strange for the Japanese to be denouncing cruelty. The attack did of course end the war within days. Had the nuclear weapon not been used then, I believe that it would have been used later, probably between nuclear powers—in other words, it would not have been a one-sided matter—with far more devastating results. The point that I am making is that, once used, the reality of nuclear warfare has meant that it has never been used again. It had to be used to demonstrate the science fact. Otherwise, it would have remained science fiction, which would never have been as effective a deterrent.
	The missile defence system entered the big league of international affairs in June 1983, when President Reagan announced the Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars. In March 1985, Gorbachev took over as Soviet leader. Between then and October 1986, when at the Reykjavik summit Reagan offered a world free of nuclear weapons—an offer that in my view fortunately foundered on the Star Wars complications—the Soviets must at some time have come to the conclusion that they could not negate the American SDI without a level of expenditure that Gorbachev recognised as unacceptable to the Russian people. At any rate, within five years the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, in June 1991. By the end of that year, Yeltsin had succeeded Gorbachev and dissolved the Soviet Union, thus ending the Cold War.
	Now we have had the Government's Trident White Paper of December 2006, with a £15 billion to £20 billion plan for the replacement of that weapons system, which was approved by the House of Commons last March. Meanwhile, the issues that we are debating today concern collaboration with the USA for its National Missile Defence system.
	We all know that the prospects of stability in the world are vanishing rapidly. It is not just that there is a frightening lack of world leadership. So many world leaders, including some leaders of the great powers, are either weak in their home bases, deeply flawed or on their way out. Furthermore, the influence of the great powers has declined. Tragically for the world, the United States seems to have used its military power to diminish its world influence.
	There is also a growing number of failed states, where a combination of economic incompetence, corruption, internal conflicts, external attacks, political anarchy and repressive regimes has created intolerable conditions for local populations. The uncompromising threat of fundamentalist Islamicism, which has overtly transferred itself from a religion into a political ideology, is growing. In the Middle East, the price of peace seems to be higher than the cost of conflict, especially given the cash flow from the high oil prices, which contribute to that regional turbulence. Indeed, the price of oil is partly a function of the regional turbulence. In whose interest, therefore, is the regional turbulence?
	The likelihood of nuclear proliferation is growing. It is probably safer to use military technology to counter it, if it happens, than military force to prevent it, because nuclear weapons remain unusable, as they have been since August 1945. I believe that we can be reasonably confident that no state that has even the semblance of a diversity of power will use them. None the less, we must have the best defence against them. For those reasons, I strongly support the principle of ballistic missile defence in Europe.
	There are important obligations on the Government. First, they must keep Parliament properly and fully informed. Many of these issues are not state secrets. The decisions made must and should depend on the feedback from the people in a parliamentary democracy. Secondly, they must ensure that we have the financial resources to meet any commitments. I have said before that the Government have to choose between providing the resources to meet their military commitments and adjusting their military commitments to their resources. At present they are doing neither. Let us be aware that the economic prospects mean that the cash flow from taxation over the coming years will look pretty sick.
	The fact remains that we are dependent on the United States for our key defence technologies. That is why I believe that we were silly to embark on competitive technologies such as the EU Galileo system, which duplicates the American navigational satellite system. Its design and development are costing the UK Government €142 million, with a further £2.3 billion for Europe as a whole for deployment and initial operation of the system up to 2013. That was ill considered indeed.
	The Government must answer other questions, too. Are interceptor missiles, as well as the method of detecting missile attacks, to be stationed in the United Kingdom? I am very unclear about where we are on that and we must debate it. We will not necessarily all agree, but this must not be done surreptitiously. We have heard about the enormous scale of Menwith Hill from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. I had not realised what a huge operation it is. It is important that local people should be consulted on the implications for them. Then there are the potential benefits for British business in developing these new systems.
	The world outlook is bleak. Never have we more needed a competent Government of integrity. Let us hope that we soon get one.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My Lords, recent developments in the field of missile defence systems, in particular the unilateral US decision to deploy anti-missile missiles and their back-up equipment to eastern Europe and the extraordinarily shrill Russian response to that decision, have reminded us of the basic fragility of the security environment in which we live in this post-Cold War era. Some statements, particularly those from the Russian side, have sounded eerily like echoes of the Cold War. While I do not believe that we are in fact slipping back towards that era, we surely need to learn lessons from some of the mistakes that have been made and to try to remedy some of the damage that has been done. Because this issue has wider implications for the whole future of mutually agreed multilateral measures of arms control and disarmament, we need, I argue, to look wider than the single matter of missile defence. We need to know a lot more than we have hitherto been told about the role that the British Government are playing in these developments and, for that, we look to the Minister replying to this debate. For all these reasons, I warmly welcome the initiative taken by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the Liberal Democrats in bringing this issue before the House.
	I should say at the outset that I do not believe that either the United States or its allies can simply afford to ignore the potential future threat from weapons of mass destruction armed missile attacks, launched by one or more of the growing number of countries seeking to acquire such a capability. So I do not favour attempting to place a blanket ban on the development or deployment of any form of anti-missile defence. There I take the same view as, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and certainly the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. To do so, in my view, not only would be doomed to failure, but could leave the United States and its allies with no better form of deterrence against such attacks than the appalling prospect of massive retaliation. That form of deterrence may have worked in the special circumstances of the Cold War, with two equally armed nuclear superpowers, each with the capacity to destroy the world, squared off against each other, but would it work in the much more fragmented, fissiparous world in which we live? There must be some reasonable doubt about that. Will it work in the medium to long-term future, whose shape we never seem terribly good at predicting? Nor do I consider the Russian response to US policy to be other than disproportionate and excessively aggressive. The idea that a very small number of anti-missile missiles deployed in Poland will pose a serious threat to Russia's security is not convincing.
	The initial approach of the US to the handling of the perceived threat seems to me to have been deeply flawed and to bear all the marks of that unilateralist approach to policy-making that has inflicted such damage on the US's reputation and its alliance relationships over recent years. Was it really wise not to ensure firm support or at least clear understanding of the reasoning behind the policy in NATO before moving ahead? Was it sensible not to consult Russia at an early stage and at every level before firm decisions were announced, given the fraught negotiations that preceded the setting aside of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002? My answer to both questions is, "Clearly not".
	The need now, surely, is to proceed much more circumspectly and cautiously towards any future decisions, particularly those on the timing and practicalities of any actual deployment of missiles, seeking to meet concerns where they are legitimate and to find ways around problems rather than bulldozing one's way through them. In all this, the element of timing is surely critical and, in the light of the recent US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, there may be slightly more of that commodity available than was thought by some a short time ago. After all, a world in which the potential threats from North Korea and Iran have been met by peaceful negotiated responses will be a totally different world from one where the diplomatic approach has definitively failed, and we are not yet at a point where we can say one or the other of those two outcomes is the more likely. It would be good to hear from the Minister whether the Government are urging such a more circumspect and cautious approach on our US allies when it comes to deployment.
	That brings us to the wider significance of this anti-missile defence issue to arms control and disarmament in general. Developments in this wider field since the turn of the century have almost all been negative. The major shift towards substantive measures of arms control and disarmament that marked the 1980s and 1990s ground to a halt and was then reversed. This was no random event, born simply of neglect or inadvertence. Any reader of Surrender is Not an Option, the recent memoir of the former US ambassador to the UN and Under Secretary for Arms Control, will see there the glee and enthusiasm with which the Bush Administration set about unilaterally dismantling existing agreements such as the ABM Treaty and destroying future ones on biological warfare verification and on a fissile material cut-off treaty, as well as blocking any prospect of bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force. This in my view misguided policy seems, fortunately, to have pretty well run its course, but it has not yet been reversed, as it surely needs to be.
	That is what makes 2008 a crucial year for arms control and disarmament, one in which we can either stand aside helplessly as the world slides towards disorder and greater insecurity for all, or one in which we collectively begin to resume the process of multilateral arms control and disarmament and to strengthen the effort against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We should be under no illusion that those two matters are closely connected. If the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is to avoid being the fiasco that its predecessor was in 2005, if the now certain major expansion of civil nuclear energy in the years ahead is not to lead to major proliferation risks from the increasingly widespread existence of countries controlling the full fuel cycle, and if the cases of Iran and North Korea are to be handled satisfactorily, the existing legitimised nuclear weapon states will need to honour their commitment to move towards nuclear disarmament. That is the view of a number of extremely distinguished US statesmen known more for their realism than for any ideological commitment to disarmament and led by two former Secretaries of State, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. It surely should be the view, too, of our own Government, but on that I wait to hear the noble Baroness when she winds up.
	This year's election in the US provides an opportunity and is, indeed, a necessary precondition for such a reversal of recent negative trends, as probably is the emergence of Russia from its cycle of parliamentary and presidential elections. But the debate needs to go wider than that and it would surely be wrong if the British Government—one of the legitimised nuclear weapon states—were to regard themselves simply as a spectator in this process. Is it not high time that the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister set out fully and publicly the British Government's thinking on the whole range of issues covered in this debate? What are we ourselves prepared to contribute to the sorely needed renaissance of multilateral arms control and disarmament? What are we doing to bring about a concerted European view on these matters, particularly a view concerted with our fellow European nuclear power, France? What progress is being made at the International Atomic Energy Agency to take decisions and to implement the Government's proposals for a uranium enrichment bank or drawing rights?
	In conclusion, I return briefly to missile defence. It is surely clear that addressing this matter on its own, in complete isolation from these wider considerations, is not likely either to work or to produce good results. We need to address it in a wider framework of resumed international co-operation over arms control issues. By this I am not suggesting any crude trade-offs or some obscure "grand bargain". The suggestion is rather that, unless we can bring about a reversal of recent negative trends and a spirit of greater mutual confidence and co-operation, dealing with each individual issue, of which this is one, will be a great deal more difficult and only too likely to lead to a further unravelling of the important international agreements that were put in place some time ago.

Lord Addington: My Lords, when I put down my name to speak in this debate I was putting my toe into new waters. I did so because I have never really felt that the idea that you could knock out of the sky all the opposing missiles of any enemy—whether they be big or small—was one that stood up to any degree of scrutiny.
	The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, pointed out that so far the answer to any of these defence systems has been simply more warheads. You fire more of them more frequently. They will come over but you will not be able to take them out with any of the proposed technologies. Thus the system may find a new justification as a rogue state may have the will and sufficient resources to equip itself with a sufficiently technologically advanced weapons system applicable to this form of defence—a defence system which has not received universal or national backing for its technological capability.
	I have a report from the United States whose cover says it all:
	"Defense Acquisitions, Missile Defense Acquisition Strategy General Results but Delivers Less at a Higher Cost".
	Another report states that the system tested has been successful so far but it was criticised for having one missile from a known target coming towards us and others that have failed.
	Will it work? Does that really matter? If we do this at a very limited level—those who are doing it may not launch it any way—and if the Americans, our allies, wish to pump vast amounts of money into this system—money which may well be better spent on accurate intelligence—does it really matter? Yes, because it might work; yes, because the technology that is being acquired here is a threat to any other major state. Once you have the delivery system you can expand any weapons system, once it has been developed and once it is in a prepared state.
	A disastrous outcome of this logic can be that huge amounts of money are pumped into a system which is inadequately deployed to meet most of the threats and others are inspired to take countermeasures. The countermeasures would, quite obviously, take out the early-warning systems, thus creating a situation in which one has to strike back earlier. That is a very familiar scenario to anyone who grew up, as I did, under the reality of mutually assured destruction. One would strike back earlier, there would be cut-off points and people would, I hope, back away. That is how the system appears to me.
	I cannot do justice to some of the ideas that came out of the Star Wars project because I would be bound to get some of the acronyms wrong, but there are lasers and chemical weapons systems and so on, which apparently are technically possible but have not yet been perfected. There are systems that can strike early in the boost phase of a missile coming towards you. That is probably where the systems will work but, once again, you will have to consider striking back at the delivery system. However, it totally fails to take into account an almost inevitable consequence: if a rogue state or a group within a state wishes to deliver a weapon of mass destruction—we are politely forgetting chemical weapons in this debate—you do not have to deliver it by missile; it could be delivered in dozens of ways. You could stick it into any conventional form of transport, give it a shipping document, send it where you want it to go and detonate it at the point of its interception by the civil authorities, so achieving your goal.
	We are using vast amounts of resources to meet a threat that does not exist, but which will annoy Russia. Whatever goes on in the mind of Russia, it is a country that, throughout its history, has shown a degree of fear and nervousness about its neighbours, which probably should be drawn to the attention of the rest of the world. It is potentially a threat to China and to India. If it is likely that the current approach will not work, the easiest way of deterring the threat is to take away valuable resources from what is going on, so alienating your potential allies who, between them, might stand a much better chance of cracking down on the problem.
	What are we buying into? It is something that might blight some form of diplomacy in international relations in the future; it could build up a victim culture in all those states—big and small—that see it potentially being directed against them; and ultimately it will not work. I suggest that we remove ourselves from it. We need to get enough distance to say that it is not the way forward. If we do not do that, we will commit ourselves to something that is ultimately counterproductive.

Lord Judd: My Lords, I join those who have expressed their genuine appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for giving the House an opportunity to discuss this issue. As a long-standing governor of the London School of Economics, I long ago came to admire the powerful, tough and sometimes relentless analysis—and the effectiveness with which it is usually deployed—of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.
	Since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been a total transformation of the context in which we approach defence. The nature of the threat has become much more complex and demanding than the relative predictability of the dynamism of the Cold War. Volatility and dispersed dangers, coupled with sinister nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities are the stark reality. The remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, deserve careful attention. I sometimes reflect that what has been regarded in the past as unorthodox has indeed become the orthodox. It is impossible to eliminate the dangers—again, the remarks and observations of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, were very important in this respect—but they can be reduced to a minimum with irreconcilable extremism marginalised.
	The battle for hearts and minds must therefore no longer be seen as a nice country weekend idea. It becomes a central, immediate, muscular priority in our strategy. A battle for hearts and minds requires vast resources for economic, social and educational policy and its implementation. This battle, together with the already existing huge demands across the world on limited military and intelligence resources, must mean that projects that pre-empt massive expenditure for years ahead—a missile defence system, like a renewed future for our own current form of nuclear deterrent, is exactly that—should be subject to the toughest possible scrutiny, analysis and evaluation to be sure that such projects are really the most effective and reliable and involve the best possible use of resources. My noble friend Lord Giddens drew attention to that important point.
	Do they convincingly meet not only current challenges but challenges we may face in the future? Among the new preoccupations posed by terrorism, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the rest, what, if any, are the Russian and Chinese dimensions in all this? Will such developments contribute to locking us into a muscle-bound inflexible and inadequate posture? We have debated this issue before but I do not believe that we have really answered the question convincingly. We and our allies owe it to our hard-pressed—indeed overstretched—service personnel in the front line to be absolutely certain. It is to them and their needs that we should look first when considering defence expenditure.
	Some may say that the proposed missile defence system is in any case a US initiative and that all we are doing is facilitating the priority of a friend and ally. That is naïve. The political implications and knock-on effects on our own priorities of our involvement are immense, and we need to be convinced that they are beyond question necessary in pursuit of what we believe are our own security interests, let alone those of Europe and the wider world. Surely, as the noble Lords, Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Hannay, with his vast experience, argued, a multilateral approach is indispensable, as is the imperative of a regenerated commitment to global disarmament.
	Against that background of the imperative for intellectual rigour we shall make an unforgivable mistake if, because of whatever misplaced emotions, we allow ourselves to be seduced—as arguably we were in the saga of the Iraq war—into an increasingly irreversible momentum. We have never honestly resolved whether the route of travel was a wise, rational and justified one. There is a debate about this in the United States. Fundamental re-evaluation of strategy in both the Democratic and Republican Parties is taking place. This would be a disastrous time to add to a momentum that risks thwarting the potential of all that exciting new thinking across the Atlantic. The Government would deserve the widespread support of us all in deciding to pause, to think extremely hard and deep, and to help our American friends to do the same before proceeding—if they decide to do so.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, raised the crucial issue of the status of the base. Defence is about defending a society that is qualitatively worth defending. One part of that reality in the United Kingdom that I passionately believe in—I make no apology for finishing on this theme—is the national parks. I declare an interest as a very active vice-president of the Council for National Parks—indeed, I live in one.
	In previous debates on US defence infrastructure in the United Kingdom the Government have provided assurances that any new missile defence system would not result in additional built development at Fylingdales, which is of course in the North York Moors National Park. A similar reassurance from my noble friend today would be good. I hope that she will give it. However, the fear must be that the major infrastructure needed will amount to a vast intrusion. I am thinking of the new and extra roads, buildings—the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire has already spelt out graphically what that means—fences and additional security, not to speak of the further loss of public access.
	Unavoidably, there will be substantial public interest in any plan that would prolong the military use of Fylingdales and could lead to a major new development in a national park. It is important, therefore, that due process is followed. This means a full environmental impact assessment, which the Government require for new, renewed or intensified military use of national parks. They require that any proposals be tested against the guidance on planning policy. This guidance includes a presumption against major developments in national parks. A public consultation should therefore take place on the future use of the site, including on whether it should remain in the national park at all, should the Government wish to sanction its use for any missile defence system. It would be helpful to have the observations of my noble friend on all this when she comes to reply.
	What the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said is something that none of us can escape. Is this part of the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom? Does the law and practice of the Untied Kingdom apply? If not, why the hell not? We need clear answers on that.
	I hope the House will forgive me if, when speaking of the national parks, I seize this opportunity to say that there has been, of late, increasing use of the national parks for military training. As a former commissioned serviceman and a former defence Minister, I obviously believe that military training is a vital part of any defence policy, but its use in national parks should be only what is absolutely essential. The national parks should, in a sense, be the last resort. We have to face the fact that the purpose of the parks is to provide psychological and physical breathing space for a stressed nation. We allow that to be removed at our peril, in terms of the quality of our society as a whole. These are not light matters, but an illustration of the very specific implications for our own national social priorities of a scheme of this kind—quite apart from the defence implications. We have not begun to look at all that. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said, the need for a major debate is absolutely imperative.

Lord Powell of Bayswater: My Lords, to avoid any possible doubt, I draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Lords' Interests, though I do not believe that any of them are directly involved. I join other noble Lords in complimenting the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, on securing this debate; the subject is extremely important. It is absolutely right that Parliament should discuss it regularly and keep it under review, and that the Government should keep Parliament informed. I am not going to follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd, into the national parks; I very much doubt that I could keep up with him once we got there.
	The essence of successful defence is to identify threats in advance and make proper provision to deter or counter them. There may be no immediate or current threat to Britain or Europe from nuclear or other weapons delivered by missiles from the Middle East area, including Iran, but it would be short-sighted not to foresee a fair probability of such a threat in the future. I do not take much comfort from the recent US national intelligence estimate on Iran. Even if Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons programme as such, it continues to produce the fissile material needed for it, and resumption of work on warheads would be a comparatively easy step. Its work on longer-range missiles certainly continues. If Iran develops such weapons, other regimes in the area will follow suit and we cannot ignore the threat that could arise.
	Ideally, diplomatic pressure and non-proliferation measures would be the best defence against this threat, but they are patently not working in the case of Iran, any more than they did for Pakistan. Equally, no Government want nuclear retaliation to be the only option for defending against a future threat, so a modest second line of defence, in the form of ballistic missile defence, makes a great deal of sense. Of course, BMD cannot stop nuclear weapons hand-delivered by terrorists, but it is the only possible defence against missiles, if not a foolproof one. It is a useful deterrent because it reduces the chance of such missiles reaching their target, and it forces a country which might consider using them to accept that the chances of success are much reduced, while the likelihood of retaliation is just as great. Bear in mind that all countries that have so far acquired nuclear weapons have also acquired the missiles to deliver them. It is a worthwhile investment.
	The idea that the sort of ballistic missile defence system currently proposed for Europe presents any sort of threat to Russia's vast arsenal of nuclear-armed missiles is frankly nonsensical and the Russians know it. It is, no doubt, the political signal of further western intrusion into what was once Warsaw Pact territory that they dislike. Sacrificing ballistic missile defence is not the way to re-establish relations with Russia. Such a cave-in would simply encourage hard-line tactics on their part in the future. The sensible course is the one on which the Americans are embarked—to discuss with the Russians how they can be included in BMD architecture, without conceding them a veto over where defensive missiles should be sited.
	Those defensive missiles have to be based where they can be effective. Since current technology means that they cannot catch up with an attacking missile from behind, they have to be in such a missile's path in order to intercept it. Poland and the Czech Republic fulfil that criterion. Obviously, those countries will want to negotiate with the US about the terms and conditions of deployment there. They will certainly, sensibly, want reassurance that an incoming American Administration next year will not simply drop the proposal altogether, leaving them to suffer damage to their relations with Russia for no ultimate advantage. That is likely to mean that it will be some time before deployment can take place, which is time for further negotiations with the Iranians and to come to a sensible arrangement with the Russians.
	By far the best place to station such interceptors is the United Kingdom. It is a great pity that the Government are not doing more to secure their stationing here. Hosting them would secure the maximum influence over the circumstances in which they are used, while minimising our financial contribution. It is about as close to a free lunch as one gets in international security. Ballistic missile defence will be the strategic system of the 21st century. I suspect that, 10 years or so from now, we shall end up buying our own missile defence system at much greater cost. I understand that the Government originally considered an offer to host the system, but were reluctant to take on simultaneously the political challenges of replacing Trident and hosting a ballistic missile defence system. They made the right decision about the Trident system. I hope it is not too late to revisit the decision on stationing BMD missiles here and come to an arrangement that is beneficial to the defence of Britain and the rest of Europe, and a system that threatens no one: not the Iranians, not the Russians—no one.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for bringing this excellent debate before us today, for his introduction of it and for keeping this matter, through his questions, constantly before Parliament. He is one of very few people to have done so.
	Should we have our own missile defence capability? Should that be within NATO or Europe, or should we simply be an outstation for the US missile defence system? I am simply not qualified to comment on the military aspects of this question. For me, yet again, the loss of Lord Garden, who died last year, is deeply felt in this debate. He not only contributed to debates on this matter, but was very active in getting speakers to inform parliamentarians, of whom I was lucky enough to be one, and encouraged a proper and informed debate among those of us who are interested in these matters. His own view, on record in many places, among them BBC Radio's "File on Four" was:
	"Taking part in US missile defence plans would put the UK at greater risk of attack ... Enemies intent on using weapons of mass destruction would see the need to take on our infrastructure, of which the ballistic missile warning radars would be a very important and perhaps the most vulnerable part".
	The noble Lord, Lord Powell of Bayswater, said that it was a free lunch, but there is an expression: "There is no such thing as a free lunch". I would bear that in mind when comparing his comments with the quote I have just given.
	Issues of whether the programme makes us more vulnerable or safer, although critical considerations, are not what have brought me to speak today. I have been encouraged to speak by the abuse of Parliament—the lack of parliamentary involvement in these important decisions. A theme runs through the Government's approach to this. It is a litany of after-the-event announcements, as enunciated by other noble Lords today. The Government say that they cannot talk about it while negotiations are going on, then that they cannot reveal exactly what is being negotiated as it is of course still confidential. Then, when negotiations are finished, they just issue a Written Statement saying what is going to happen.
	My first experience of this was in 2003 when I tabled a Written Question. The reply of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, to Question HL3913 was:
	"Details of the separate bilateral agreement regarding the roles and responsibilities of each government in respect of the upgrade remain confidential while negotiations are in progress".—[Official Report, 16/7/03; col. WA126.]
	On 15 January 2003, Mr Hoon outlined the Government's initial reactions to the US request. In 2003, the MoD relented a bit and published a missile defence discussion paper which asked some important questions. Of course, the Government then answered the questions themselves because, in October 2004, they signed an agreement with the US Administration, and merely informed the House through a Written Statement. This prompted the first outrage of the Defence Select Committee:
	"Despite the Secretary of State's unequivocal statement that he wanted the decision to be informed by public and parliamentary discussion, he has acted in a way that has effectively curtailed such discussions".
	History then repeated itself last year when the Government again made a decision, to give permission to the US Administration to use Menwith Hill. My honourable friend Norman Baker asked what formal agreement and Memorandum of Understanding was produced. The answer was most unsatisfactory because the agreement was simply given in an exchange of classified letters, and no comment at all was made on the Memorandum of Understanding. I could go on, but other noble Lords have spelt it out. A theme of absolute failure to involve Parliament runs through this.
	Again, the Select Committee voiced its concern in absolutely unequivocal terms:
	"We regret the manner and timing of the announcement. And there's a resulting lack of parliamentary debate on the issue".
	The Select Committee went on to recommend that there should be full parliamentary debate on these proposals, but it has been left to the Liberal Democrats to bring any debate at all, which we are pleased to do. But the Government really must give the other place the chance to debate this in full. At none of these stages before the fait accompli, therefore, has Parliament been give the chance to debate and, I suggest, vote on so critical and important a principle.
	My noble friend Lord Wallace suggested that this was an extremely important part of international agreements. I thoroughly agree. Perhaps I am more of what the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, described as a fundamentalist. Probably the only place where I would part company with my noble friend Lord Wallace is that I am unilateralist, and I do not believe in nuclear weapons under any circumstances. It would take something to persuade me about missile defence. However, these questions need to be debated extremely widely.
	Before I close, I also want to pay tribute to the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. It operates in Yorkshire near Menwith Hill. It has been the eyes and ears of the public for what is happening there; it first revealed in 1997 that Menwith Hill was to be designated as the European ground relay station. It has continued to raise this issue ever since. Its members have suffered an awful lot of personal aggravation, and I ask the Minister to look into some of the history of this. They have been arrested but not charged, and charged but the charges have been dropped; they would have welcomed those charges being pursued so that they could have had their day in court. In one case, violence was used against a member, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been given for that. However, it has been incredibly important that people on the ground have been there to see what is happening with planning permissions and some of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Judd.
	I wish them well in their campaign. They regularly campaign on Tuesdays outside Menwith Hill to draw attention to the unaccountability of this American base on British soil. Whether the Government ultimately come to the conclusion that we need the missile defence system or not, it must still be on British soil and accountable to the UK.

Lord Sheikh: My Lords, I am pleased to be able to make this contribution, which addresses one of the most important defence issues facing our world, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on securing the debate. It is important that all aspects of these issues are explored in great depth.
	I am fully supportive of the principle of a missile defence system in Europe. The threat that we are confronted with through nuclear proliferation underlies the important need to look at such a system very seriously. We must be able to defend ourselves, and while few would wish to see a growth in the number and sophistication of weapons around the globe, it is essential that we have the capacity to defend those values that constitute our national culture against the ever growing threats and dangers. Ignoring the risks is no safe way to reduce the number of weapons or the dangers that we face.
	The Government's decision to co-operate closely with the United States, particularly alongside our allies in the Czech Republic and Poland, adds to the protection of the United Kingdom and to the broader region as a whole. Co-operation with the United States on defence issues has proved to be of great value to this country for a long time, and I want to see that continue. That is not to imply that we should become slaves to American foreign policy. We should be able to have a distinctive voice of our own, and evaluate our own contribution to global defence. The important role that NATO has played in our national defence should not be forgotten, and we must ensure that the proposals in the treaty of Lisbon, soon to be debated in your Lordships' House, are not allowed to undermine the importance of NATO and our relationship with the United States. A common European defence policy must not be allowed to interfere with the effectiveness of NATO, as our participation and support of NATO is vital for our safety and involvement overseas.
	The United States nationwide missile defence system programme was started in October 1999, and resulted in its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in June 2002. American interest in developing this form of defence system has been extensive and long-standing. Their perception of the danger faced is severe; the possible threat of attacks from other states through ballistic missiles armed with conventional, nuclear, biological or chemical warheads is considered real. The consequence for international security is grave—if we get this wrong, we are included in those at risk.
	There has been some negative impact on relations with China and Russia as a consequence of the handling of the missile defence system programme. It is important that ways are found to ensure that no permanent damage is done, and that good channels of communication are kept open. Yet the Government have failed to be as open to the House as would be beneficial on the development of a missile defence system in Europe. Parliament has a right to be treated better, and it does the Government no credit that they have not decided to be more open in their communication on the project. I could cite the example of dozens of parliamentary questions which demonstrate the evasive approach that the Government have adopted in communicating with Parliament. This may seem to be a constant critique on the conduct of this Government, and it is a real shame. With that in mind, it is also a shame that this debate is not being held in government time. Will the Minister update us on the discussions that have been held with her counterparts from the United States, and give a commitment to returning to the House in government time for a further debate in due course?
	An example of this is demonstrated by the Government's indecision. As recently as 2001, the Government were proclaiming that there was,
	"no significant ballistic missile threat to the UK".—[Official Report, Commons, 6/11/01; col. 129W.]
	At the same time, the Government were expressing support for the development of the American programme, and were proactive in co-operation. What is the current position with the radar system at RAF Fylingdales? The site in north Yorkshire has been a part of the United States ballistic missile early warning system since 1963. Can the Minister provide us with further details on the use of RAF Menwith Hill? The Government need to demonstrate greater clarity on the use, by United States forces, of United Kingdom facilities.
	The suitability of our defence research capacity is important. We spend significantly less than our allies in the United States on defence research. What is the contribution of research conducted in this country, and by our allies, to the development of a missile defence system? Are we able to deliver our own defence?
	To conclude, of course we all appreciate that the defence of our nation is the primary function of government and we need to be vigilant at all times. Yet I kindly ask the Government to be more open. I look forward to hearing the Minister's reply.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine: My Lords, I too pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for securing this debate. It is a sad reflection on parliamentary accountability that the Opposition have to use their time on debates of this matter of national and international significance, which should in any event be discussed in Parliament, on the back of a serious and meaningful dialogue within the whole country. I am not a defence expert so will not go into the scientific arguments of ballistic missile defence, or the merits of these new hit-to-kill systems. My concern is with why the UK has nailed its colours to yet another American mast, of something that I regret is again sailing in the wrong direction, and what this means for international peace and security.
	I am of a privileged generation which, had I grown up in the West, would have seen and taken for granted peace throughout my life. In fact, I lived in a part of the world, south Asia, where my father actively served in two of three wars in a space of just over 15 years. I witnessed on television the speech by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto at the United Nations, stating that Pakistan's citizens—of which I was one—would eat grass in order to secure their safety from India. This was in the context of developing nuclear weapons. Oddly enough, he had massive support for this and Pakistan's development was compromised in order for its military-industrial complex to be able to boast of its ranking as a nuclear power. I subsequently lived in the Middle East and experienced the Israeli invasion of Lebanon first-hand. Conflict, at all levels, has been part of the calculation of international relations in my experience.
	My noble friend Lord Wallace spoke at some length about the damage this US project has done and will continue to do to the international system. The window of opportunity we saw in the early 1990s, when it appeared that the permanent members of the Security Council could work together, has passed. What we have seen since the late 1990s has been a slow, steady decline of multilateralism in all fields, whether you are talking about trade, good governance and democracy, conflict prevention or security. The danger of this decline is evident. Those of us who take an interest in the Middle East have long despaired of Israel's unilateralism, usually accompanied with silence from the US, and increasingly from the United Kingdom, too—most recently witnessed in the execution of the air war against Lebanon in 2006. In a region which has seen wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and 2006—I may have forgotten one or two—the heightened sense of insecurity on all sides calls for powerful nations to be even more careful about nuclear proliferation.
	At minimum, some restraint on one's own capabilities is required, if one is a superpower. Yet there are consequences of unilateralism in a wider context, too. To take the case of Pakistan, of which we have heard a lot in the last few weeks, the strategic long-term question about US and UK support for the military there is founded on the view that the military being in control of the nukes is preferable to the mullahs being in control of them. We also understand from press reports that, should the military be driven from power, contingency plans are in place for the US to guarantee surgical strikes against Pakistan's capabilities, to eliminate the threat. The informed view in Pakistan is that these operations will be undertaken by India by proxy, if the US does not move first. The death, destruction and future conflict that either of these scenarios would unleash bears some reflection.
	Given these contexts, it does not seem entirely surprising that states which feel threatened, and which have seen the lessons of unilateralism go unpunished, are prepared to go their own way. We have seen the US move away from the diplomatic track to one of identification of states that are allies and dangerous rogue states—those that are not allies but must be tolerated and factored into the equation, such as China and Russia. This was set out in the 2001 National Intelligence Council's report on missile threats in 1999, and formed the background to the current strategy. It was supposedly on this basis that President Bush set out his strategy on the new need for a more ambitious National Missile Defence system, which would address all potential threat scenarios.
	I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Powell of Bayswater, is not in his place at the moment. He defended US developments vis-à-vis Russia and Russia's capabilities. Yet the House of Commons Library briefing Ballistic Missile Defence: Recent Developments talks about that estimate from the National Intelligence Council. About Russia, it states:
	"Unless Moscow significantly increases funding for its strategic forces, the Russian arsenal will decline to less than 2000 warheads by 2015—with or without arms control ... Although Russia still maintains the most comprehensive ballistic missile force capable of reaching the United States, structure decisions resulting from resource problems, program development failures, weapon system aging, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and arms control treaties have resulted in a steep decline in Russian strategic nuclear forces over the last 10 years".
	That is the Americans saying so, let alone anyone else.
	In that report, the threats that were initially identified were expected to be from a group of rogue states—North Korea, Libya, Iraq and Iran, as my noble friend Lord Wallace said. We know that diplomacy has been successful in the case of the first two: nuclear weapons have been negotiated away. The third, Iraq, to the extent that it was a threat at all, has been bombed away, which leaves Iran, and we know that the national intelligence estimate of a few weeks ago has cast serious doubt about Iran's capability—in the near future at least.
	With Iran as the sole so-called rogue state which might at some future point be able to target other Middle Eastern states, one cannot see the case for a US defence system to be based on the European mainland, in Poland, the Czech Republic or the UK, as current scenario planning envisages. That leads one to suspect, as Russia does, that the National Missile Defence system is of broader strategic value with other aims than those publicly stated.
	The stoking-up of fear of Iran has other consequences too, where other countries in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the former with historical antagonism towards Iran—calculate that unilateralism pays. They calculate that sanctions against US allies that indulge in proliferation will go unpunished, as we have seen in the cases of Israel, India and Pakistan. Hence those two states may well assume that the United States, in proceeding with missile defence, is prepared to sanction the development of nuclear weapons in their case too. Several nuclear armed states in the Middle East will not further the cause of peace and security in the region.
	I turn to our Government's enthusiasm for this project. As many noble Lords have pointed out, we are told that the missile shield is meant to offer wider protection across Europe. That assumption disregards the slightly more immediate and realistic scenario: that if WMD are to be used, they will be used by non-state actors through international terrorism. The shield will not protect against that.
	Apart from the evident loss of sovereignty and the danger of increased nuclear proliferation, there is a further symbolic aspect: our role as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. We are still seen—less so after the Iraq war—as a moderating and balancing power which, due to its historic connections in most parts of the world, can sometimes play a restraining hand. What appears to be our uncritical engagement with this project will diminish that role. That will have a cost beyond the tenure of this Government to the security of future generations.
	I conclude with some thoughts from the Guardian leader of 24 February 2007. It states:
	"The idea that Britain should offer to house the new anti-ballistic missiles which the United States wants to base in Europe is on the far side of folly ... if you are thinking of a legacy to the nation, should it be to dig holes in the ground for weapons that will not work and whose successors are also unlikely to work? ... If there were a real threat it would be a different matter, but the proposed European anti-ballistic-missile shield is not a response to a threat but the product of twisted thinking in Washington".
	The leader concludes:
	"Washington is ignoring the reality that if a real threat did arise from the Middle East, it would be best dealt with by cooperative military arrangements between the West and Russia, and possibly China as well, working together to operate a joint missile shield".
	I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that the Government for whom she speaks will reflect on this debate.

Lord Young of Norwood Green: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for giving us the opportunity to debate this vital issue. Listening to the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, I am reminded that these debates always take place against the backdrop of whether you are coming from a unilateralist or a multilateralist position. My attitude towards nuclear weapons has gone through the full spectrum, from a totally unilateralist position to one where I recognise that, although I do not like nuclear weapons—I abhor them—they are there. As the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, reminded us, they are an unfortunate reality with which we must deal. That is why I have moved towards a multilateralist position.
	I listened with interest to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. Although I share some of his analysis, I feel that his description of Menwith Hill as somewhere that totally serves American interests, or hegemonic American interests, causing us to become Airstrip One—I hope that I am not paraphrasing too wildly—was a little over the top. I was reading the Statement on Menwith Hill. We may not all like it, but I thought that it would be useful to quote from it. It states:
	"Also, at RAF Menwith Hill, equipment will be installed and operated by the US Government to allow receipt of satellite warnings of potentially hostile missile launches and will pass this warning data to both UK and US authorities. The data will also be fed into the US ballistic missile defence system for use in its response to any missile attack on the US. This will guarantee the UK's continued access to essential missile attack warning data, as well as enhancing the ability of the US to deal with any attack aimed at that country".—[Official Report, Commons, 25/7/07; col. 77WS.]
	I do not want to go on, because I am conscious of time. I accept that there may be other uses, which may well be worth a debate, but I thought that it was useful to cite that.
	I share the view of my noble friend Lord Giddens. I, too, do not like the use of the term "neocon", because it introduces into the debate an emotional description that does not take us forward. The attitudes of American Governments are varied and tend to change over time.
	A number of contributors attacked the system on the basis of whether it would work. Of course, the whole concept of nuclear deterrence was that no one wanted these weapons to work in operation but hoped that they would work as a deterrent. Over a period, I would say that those who argued that it would be an effective deterrent were proved right. All of us in this Chamber remember that we came through a period when we had the wonderful acronym MAD, which meant mutually assured destruction. What a dreadful thought. The unilateralists said that the end of the world would occur if we continued on that course; the multilateralists said that the system would not and that it would prove to be an effective deterrent. Your analysis of history depends on your perspective, but I tend to believe that the multilateralists have been proved right over a period.
	There are those who have argued that any support for this system has made Russia more belligerent and hostile. I do not think that we can have any debate on the attitude of Russia today without recognising, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, reminded us, that we are in a period when Russia as a nation state is seeking to assert itself on the world stage. It is going through its own electoral cycle, which causes President Putin to make various statements that are, I would say, somewhat over the top but that serve his political purpose. There are those who also allege that this system would mean a loss of UK sovereignty. I do not see that. Like the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, I do not believe that our sovereignty is threatened. We are, after all, still NATO partners, a fact that some seem to have almost forgotten.
	I was interested when the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said that going down this road would blight any form of diplomacy—I think that that was the phrase that he used. I have concerns about that issue and I thought that it would be useful to look at the Select Committee report. Paragraph 270 from its 25 November report says:
	"At the G8 Summit ... President Putin appeared to surprise President Bush by suggesting co-operation on BMD via joint US and Russian use of existing radar facility".
	It does not seem to have blighted diplomacy there. Paragraph 271 says:
	"In October 2007, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates went to Moscow for talks with their Russian counterparts".
	The talks have not led to a resolution of the problem, but it is wrong to say that this has blighted any form of diplomacy. I do not think that that is the case. Moreover, situations change. Those who characterise or caricature the American approach as being one that is based only on the military analysis seem to me to ignore the approach that has been taken towards North Korea. We see that as progress that has been achieved through diplomacy. We should not take absolute positions or describe the US as having only one strategy. As a number of people have said, if we are talking about electoral cycles, the US position could change.
	I share some of the concerns that have been expressed to the Government. I think that the critics who said that there has not been enough transparency and accountability have a point, which it is essential for the Minister to answer in her response. This is going to be a continuing and important debate. In their Statement on 25 July, the Government said:
	"We have no plans to site missile interceptors in the UK but will keep this under review as the threat evolves".—[Official Report, Commons, 25/7/07; col. 77WS.]
	I do not mind them keeping it under review but I would like an assurance that there will be a debate before a decision is taken. That is vital.
	I must declare an interest, which I should have declared at the outset. I am a member of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body. If decisions were taken in relation to the siting of missiles et cetera, I would be worried whether that would have an impact on defence expenditure and on our ability to ensure that the Armed Forces are suitably rewarded for their contribution.
	I think that I have covered the key issues that I wanted to raise. Once again, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I reiterate the three key points that concern me: the question of transparency and accountability; the ability to debate whether we should participate further on the siting of interception missiles; and the question of financial resources.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, I am grateful that so many Peers have come to take part in this extremely important debate. The debate has had two specific purposes. The first—and I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Young, said what he did in the last few minutes—relates to what I can only describe in quite strong language as virtually a contemptuous treatment of Parliament. Over several years now, we have consistently had responses from Ministers to the effect that we are not entitled to comment on anything to do with this bilateral system—and it is a bilateral system, not, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, suggested, a NATO system. I will give two recent examples. On 14 June 2007, Mr Hoon said:
	"President Putin's offer to include the radar at Qabala in Azerbaijan in the US ballistic missile system is a policy issue for the United States government".—[Official Report, Commons, 14/6/07; col. 1215W.]
	It was not an issue for anybody else. In a debate in this House on 22 November, when my noble friend Lord Wallace raised a question on this matter, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—I know that we all regret that she is indisposed at the present time and not able to take part in this debate—replied:
	"The bilateral discussions between Russia and the United States over co-operation on ballistic missile defence are not for the UK to comment on".—[Official Report, 22/11/07; col. 924.]
	Yet we find ourselves faced with a proposal for a substantial increase in the facilities at Menwith Hill. We even face the possibility of the United Kingdom becoming the next area for a ballistic missile interceptor system. However, Parliament has been entitled to talk about this hardly at all over the past few years. As my noble friend Lady Falkner said, it is extraordinary that it should have been left to one opposition party to bring this matter to the attention of the House. That is the first point and I think that we should make it very seriously. If Parliament is to be treated as a significant part of the decision-making processes of a democracy, the Government have to be more open, more frank and more informative about this crucial aspect of our defence policy.
	The second, wider issue was raised by the noble Lords, Lord Giddens and Lord Hannay, and by many others: how do we deal with the extremely disturbing situation that we face in the world at present? Let me refer back, as did the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, in an interesting historical speech, to the fact that the period in which there was the greatest advance in not only controlling the dissemination of arms but in creating far less opportunity for terrorists was immediately after the end of the Cold War.
	Last month, I attended a conference in the United States at which Mr Gorbachev pointed out repeatedly the extraordinary advances that were made at that time: a reduction of some 6,000 nuclear missiles, destroyed between the United States and Russia; a huge advance in securing nuclear materials; and a huge advance in establishing a whole set of safeguards for the whole world with regard to the Cold War legacy of a huge number of nuclear materials and weapons strewn across a vast range of the world. It was in that period immediately after the Cold War that Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries completely gave up any ambitions that they might have had for developing a nuclear weapon. At the conference, Mr Gorbachev repeatedly said that there had to be a return to multilateral controls because, without them, it is impossible to see how we can control the dissemination and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It is simply an illusion to suppose that some form of missile defence in eastern Europe or, for that matter, in the United Kingdom can deal with an issue so great as this. It is a tragedy that we have seen a gradual erosion—as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said in his eloquent speech, and as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, pointed out—of the whole system of arms control and disarmament that has protected the world for the past 40 years from the possibility of a major nuclear exchange.
	Let me say one more thing about that period. Gradually a large part of the world became committed to looking at some of the dangers of terrorism. It is vital to point out to those who believe, as the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, did, that the proposal called MAD—mutually assured destruction—still holds good that many of the most serious situations involve not state actors but non-state actors. We have to address that problem.
	The noble Lord, Lord Powell of Bayswater, made somewhat light of Russia's reaction to the attempt to place missile defences in central and eastern Europe. I do not believe that we should treat it so lightly. Russia may be exaggerating; she may be going over the top. But anyone in this House or elsewhere who has studied the history of Russia will know that a consistent theme runs through it: the fear of encirclement, which was mentioned only in the past two weeks by such players as the Russian Foreign Secretary and the Russian Prime Minister. Russia's reactions may be emotional and not wholly rational, but that does not mean that they are not real and do not need to be taken into account.
	We already know what Russia's response has been. Just in the past few days, she has withdrawn from the crucial conventional forces in Europe treaty, which has limited the number of troops and conventional weapons based in Europe to the great advantage of peace in the world. We know that Russia is now talking about the possibility of a nuclear response to the use of missiles or the return of missiles as an anti-missile defence in central and eastern Europe. It is true that General Baluyevsky, head of the central command of the Russia armed forces, may be going over the top in what he says. But when he says that Russian missiles are automatically trained to respond immediately to any missile attack and that there is the possibility therefore of a grave mistake that would lead to nuclear-tipped weapons landing in Europe, we would be very foolish not to take that threat at least fairly seriously.
	As others have said in this debate, on top of that the Russians are now talking about moving towards a more sophisticated system of missiles that would be capable of withstanding anti-missile defences. I do not know whether that is true, but it is a significant question that needs to be addressed and about which Parliament should hear the concerns that many people have.
	In the short run, more disturbingly to me, Russia is showing signs of ceasing to co-operate with the western world, and with the United States in particular, in the very area where its co-operation with the United States has been most successful: the securing of nuclear materials, control over the supply of fissile materials and all the things with which we should be profoundly concerned, given the massive increase in civil nuclear power that now lies before us. Scores of countries will now have access to uranium and other forms of nuclear fuel. We will have to depend on their trustworthiness in deciding that they do not become nuclear powers. The anti-missile defences in no way address this issue, yet the issue is one of the most important to confront us today.
	There are those who believe that one of the reasons why the United States pursued the proposal bilaterally with Poland and the Czech Republic was Donald Rumsfeld's attempt to divide old and new Europe. Certainly, there was no attempt to discuss the proposal with the rest of the NATO countries of Europe, although there should have been. We now know that Poland and the Czech Republic are beginning to reconsider their position. In Poland, on this very day, the Polish Foreign Minister is meeting his opposite number in the Czech Republic to see what their combined reaction should be to the American proposal. Today, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister is in Warsaw to discuss the implications of the proposal for Polish-Russian relations.
	A few days ago in the Czech Republic, 1,000 people demonstrated against Czech involvement in missile defence. In Poland, there has been a marked swing of opinion, with Mr Sikorski, the Foreign Secretary, specifically saying that, although the missile defence is in the interests of the United States, it is not clear whether it is in the interests of Poland. Changes of government in Poland and the Czech Republic have put this whole project at risk, yet so far the United Kingdom has not been consulted or, as far as I know, informed about the way in which these relationships are going.
	The most important issue in this debate was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, in an impressive speech, and in the eloquent speeches made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and others. I believe that the United Kingdom Government, our Foreign Office and our Ministry of Defence are increasingly out of touch with a significant movement in American opinion. The noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Giddens, referred to the proposal—the so-called Wall Street Journal letter of last year—signed by Mr Kissinger, Mr Schultz, Mr Perry and Senator Nunn, calling on a redirection of nuclear weapons disarmament policy gradually towards the destruction of all such weapons.
	Congress has already decided that it will not go ahead with appropriations for the ballistic missile defence system unless there is full agreement from Poland and the Czech Republic. I have already mentioned the doubts raised on that issue. Congress has decided specifically that it wants to make sure that the missile systems work. My noble friend Lord Addington spoke powerfully on whether or not they do. It is perhaps worth quoting an extremely impressive and, I believe, important editorial in the New York Times on 30 December. It states:
	"Paying a huge monetary and diplomatic price to respond to a threat that does not yet exist with a system that does not yet work has always seemed foolish and counterproductive".
	That theme has run through a great deal of the American debate. Does this system work? Has it been presented as working when it has essentially been manipulated to produce a successful result? My noble friend Lord Addington referred to recent tests in which it was known where the missile was coming from and what its route would be; even then, many of the tests failed.
	Perhaps most important are the Russian offers of co-operation made last summer. Russia did not initially respond by marching out of one multilateral agreement after the other. Incidentally, more frightening still, Russia is now threatening to march out of the intermediate nuclear force treaty and even START, which has reduced the arsenals of nuclear missiles held throughout the world by large proportions and which dies out in 2009. Have Her Majesty's Government embarked on any serious study of the extension of that crucial treaty in order to allow for a new verification system, given that the present one will die in 2009 and it is all that we have?
	On the American reaction, there has been little debate—almost none, as many have said—in our Parliament. In the United States, during the presidential primaries, the Republican and Democrat candidates have put forward their suggestions and ideas. As my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire pointed out, in the case of the Republicans the discussion has largely been about whether this is directed at Russia or someone else. It is important that two of the leading contenders think that it is directed at Russia, which goes some way towards explaining why Russia is so profoundly worried about the whole development. The Democrat candidates have been discussing to a much greater extent how we can deal with the whole issue of proliferation. They have been attracted to the ideas put forward in that Wall Street Journal letter and, subsequently, in the Congress and by the body to which I belong, the Nuclear Threat Initiative. American opinion is moving towards a new approach to this huge issue.
	I am deeply worried by the extent to which Her Majesty's Government appear to be still talking the language of an Administration who are shortly to leave office, as the language of an exchange of deterrents is increasingly made foolish by the existence of non-state actors and terrorist groups. I would plead that the Government reconsider their attitude towards anti-missile defence in the light of recent developments. I am not saying not that it should not exist; I am arguing that the Government should take much more seriously the possibility of co-operation between Russia, the United States and others in mounting an effective international system of defence.
	I will conclude with a quotation from the significant New York Times editorial, which has had deep influence on the primary elections in the United States, about the offer that Putin made last summer of sharing a Russian early warning radar system in Azerbaijan. The Americans dismissed the offer at the time, but the editorial said:
	"American officers who have checked out the site have come away impressed with its capabilities. A joint United States-Russian military operation on Iran's borders could do a lot to get Tehran to rethink its nuclear plans".
	It is crucial to make sure that Iran does not move to get a nuclear bomb. It is crucial that Iran should be reassured that she will not herself be the victim of a nuclear attack; that is a crucial part of the outcome. I believe that we should look at the New York Times approach carefully and see whether we could not now get an international agreement and abandon what has been much too unilateralist, much too exclusive and much too destructive an approach.

Lord Luke: My Lords, I should like to start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for securing the debate, which at the very least has shown how many different and strongly held opinions there are on this important subject. I am very aware that it is not an easy task to debate this question. It brings with it some uncomfortable truths. The international community is not a safe place and sadly it has not become safer since the end of the Cold War. With each new horrific terrorist attack, it becomes more grotesquely clear that there are rogue states and organisations that will stop at nothing in the pursuit of territorial, political and, sadly, religious expansionism. The need for this House even to consider such a thing as a missile defence system is its stark manifestation. We on these Benches are in favour of preserving human life and therefore ensuring global peace. Therefore, if the missile system enables this, then we are in support of it.
	However, we will not support Her Majesty's Government entering into any particular missile system without sufficient parliamentary discussion or gauging popular consent. In July last year when Her Majesty's Government said that they would take part in the next stage of the proposed US Ballistic Missile Defence initiative, at RAF Menwith Hill, they came close to such circumvention. The decision to upgrade the existing radar technology to allow the US to collect it for its own BMD system was indeed a major decision, but it was announced just before the Recess.
	I wonder whether the Minister can adequately defend Her Majesty's Government against the claim of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee that they "buried" the statement. We stand foursquare behind Her Majesty's Government's diplomatic friendship with America and of course the special relationship. While the MoD believes that currently there is no significant ballistic missile threat to the UK we cannot and must not ever ignore the increasing number of states that are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and missile capabilities.
	In March 2007 General Obering's conclusions from testing the interceptors went some way to silencing critics who believe that the Star Wars technology is incapable of working and showed that a missile could be successfully intercepted before arriving at its target. However, like your Lordships, I am aware that one of the system's most dangerous, important and powerful critics, Russia's President Putin, does not see this as a defence system at all, but as thinly veiled aggressive American expansionism. He is most concerned by the negotiations for the placement of land interceptor sites in Poland and radar installations in the Czech Republic. He has phrased comments about the US missile defence system in June last year in language that sounded ominously close to the language of the Cold War and past arms races.
	Any threat to Russia from the defence system is nonsensical. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, Russia could one day come into the system. Will the Minister comment on the recent sale by Ofcom of the radio spectrum band used by Fylingdales? Is she confident that a commercial user of the band, having bought it, will not be adversely affected by any subsequent US military installation at Fylingdales? It is lunacy if our effort to safeguard our nation provokes hostility and fear from other nations. I feel Her Majesty's Government must be committed to showing the world that the missile defence system is not seen as an alternative to diplomacy, not even as a back-up, but as a last resort only.
	Will the Minister give an assurance that the UK's future negotiations with the US regarding this defence mechanism will be proceeded with through open negotiations? I am anxious that Her Majesty's Government should avoid stoking any further the fires of Russia's increasing—and unnecessary—suspicion over US defence measures by seeming to act covertly. Does the Minister agree that we must avoid any situation arising again like that of February 2007 when there was so much media speculation that the Government might have offered to base the third missile interceptor site on UK soil instead of in Poland?
	My noble friend Lord Marlesford rightly pointed out that there is no difference between the issue of sovereignty now as it has been since the first American bases were placed in this country. He also most interestingly drew some historical analogies as to how the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 has stopped further use. However, there is always a threat, particularly if a rogue power, if there are such things, or possibly even an organisation, gets hold of a nuclear weapon.
	I look forward to hearing and participating in further debates on this contentious issue. With Poland's new governmental administration it is now far from certain that America will be able to build any interceptor sites at all on Polish land. Dissenting from the previous Government's policy, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, pointed out, the new foreign minister Radek Sikorski said last weekend, conjuring up memories of our incredibly brave allies from Poland in World War Two:
	"This is an American, not a Polish project".
	I do not know what that means. It does not say that Poland is not going to have it. It simply distances Poland from it and perhaps negotiations will change the situation. Furthermore, I ask whether we can even be certain of America's commitment to the cause, for in November of this year there will be a new president, who will not necessarily be a patron of the missile defence system. Indeed, how confident is the noble Baroness that an anti-missile shield will ever be completed at all?
	I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Powell, on their excellent short speeches; they were both most eloquent.
	To conclude, I reiterate that we on these Benches support the concept behind missile defence. That being said, any further addition to US military assets or expansion of military facilities in this country should go through a proper review and debate both in this House and the other place.

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, this robust and extremely well-informed debate has given us all an opportunity to air our views on the issue of ballistic missile defence, in particular the UK's participation in the planned US missile defence architecture. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who for many years has been keeping his experienced eye on this area of policy, for initiating the debate. I reiterate that my noble friend Lady Taylor is sorry that she cannot be present to respond today because of illness.
	The Government have never been afraid of debating the issue of ballistic missile defence. Indeed, a Commons debate on this issue took place in early 2003 after the Government received a US request to upgrade the missile tracking radar system at RAF Fylingdales, and after the Ministry of Defence had published a discussion document on missile defence in November 2002. The principles underlying missile defence have not changed in the intervening time. The noble Baronesses, Lady Williams of Crosby, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer and Lady Falkner, my noble friend Lord Judd, the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, and my noble friend Lord Giddens, who said that he is a critic of the Government's position, have all raised the issue of a lack of opportunity for a proper debate on the issue as they see it. I would say that both Houses have had an opportunity to question Defence Ministers on missile defence, both in writing and orally, and rightly so. As the then Prime Minister said on 28 February last year, if the Government need to re-examine their position on missile defence and take further steps on participation, then we will present those propositions to the House and have the necessary discussions, but we would seek to do this only when there are proposals or propositions to be made. At present, there are none.
	It is the prime responsibility of any Government to ensure as far as possible the safety and security of their people, and it is this responsibility that is at the core of government policy. Co-operation with the United States is part of that responsibility, as the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, pointed out, and as we have said on many occasions, the UK Government have no plans independently to acquire ballistic missile defence assets for this country. We were asked by the noble Lords, Lord Luke, Lord Wallace, Lord Marlesford, my noble friend Lord Judd and several other noble Lords whether we have plans to host UK ballistic missile interceptor sites in the UK. I can say that we have no plans to do so. As of today, we do not believe that any state with ballistic missiles currently has the intention to target them against the UK mainland. However, we would be foolish not to keep a vigilant eye on the world and on any changes in the strategic threat.
	The noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Marlesford, put the strategic threat into an historical context; it is a threat that we have faced over many decades. Missiles and weapons of mass destruction are proliferating among states of concern. The pace of that proliferation, as well as the intentions of the states developing those capabilities, is hard to gauge, and that has come through in the debate. Indeed, a NATO feasibility study into missile defence reported in 2006 and recognised a growing threat from long-range missiles that could reach the territory of NATO members. Although work on ballistic missile defence in the NATO context is reaching maturity, no decision has yet been taken by NATO on the acquisition of a ballistic missile defence capability to protect NATO homelands. Rather than alienating our allies, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, suggested in his forceful and effective contribution, we are working closely with our NATO allies on this.
	There have also been claims that the deployment of US missile defence systems in Europe will provoke a new arms race with Russia. In response to this, I would simply point out that the US development of its missile defence system is a response to, and not the cause of, the emerging threat from a number of countries of concern which are developing or seeking to obtain long-range missiles. But Russia has raised a number of concerns about the US plans. Although we do not believe, along with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that we are slipping back into a Cold War era, we have to take those concerns seriously. Russia has asserted that the missile defence system could be used in an offensive way against it. In response, Russia threatens to target unspecified locations in Europe with nuclear weapons. The deployment of 10 missile defence interceptors is demonstrably irrelevant to a Russian strategic nuclear arsenal still numbering thousands of warheads, as the noble Lord, Lord Powell, has said. Poland, as the proposed site for the interceptor missiles, is a good option for responding to a threat from the Middle East, and not Russia. The Russians are fully aware of the capabilities and limitations of the proposed US system and are aware that their security should not and could not be threatened by it, a point suggested by my noble friend Lord Young.
	Russia has linked missile defence with a threatened withdrawal from, and the suspension of, its obligations to legally binding treaties. Russia has also questioned the perceived threat from Iran. The recently published US National Intelligence Estimate, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, assesses that Iran is likely to have ceased its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and is unlikely to have restarted it. The US assessment does not change the fundamental problem that we face—Iran is pursuing a uranium-enrichment programme that has, as far as we can see, no civilian application despite the unanimous demand from the UN Security Council and the IAEA that it stop. Instead, the IAEA has said that its knowledge of Iran's programme is diminishing. We must address this concern and do so now.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and my noble friend Lord Giddens both suggested that US/Russian collaboration is much needed on missile defence, and I am pleased to say that both nations have taken a positive and constructive approach to addressing the concerns that have been aired. At recent discussions in Moscow, the US suggested a number of practical and realistic measures to resolve the impasse, and encouraged discussion and information-sharing on the level of threat that the ballistic missile defence system could offer protection against.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, I hope the Minister will forgive me for interrupting, but what she has just said is extremely important. Can Her Majesty's Government make known to this House what proposals are being put forward by the United States in the light of the earlier rejection of the Russian proposals with regard to Azerbaijan?

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, I am not certain that I can answer the question on Azerbaijan, so I will write to the noble Baroness, but I think that my next paragraph will answer the first part of her question.
	In November, the US formally presented its proposals. These included federating Russian radar sensors into a joint missile defence architecture; creating joint missile defence data exchange centres in Russia and Europe; and the phased activation of the European architecture. That was an important point—that it can be activated in response to any increase in the ballistic missile threat from countries of concern. These discussions have been encouraging, and although a solution is still some way off—again, some noble Lords in the debate were sceptical that a solution would be found—we do believe that good progress is being made.
	In considering the way ahead, we are conscious of the importance of NATO allies sending clear messages to Russia, and of our own commitment to upholding the principles that have served European security so well since the end of the Cold War: openness, consensus, transparency, engagement, honouring politically binding and legally binding obligations, and host state consent for the presence of foreign military forces. We will continue to work through NATO to promote these principles and we urge Russia to work with us to do the same.
	US discussions continue with the Polish and the Czech Governments on the basing of the additional missile defence assets in Europe. These discussions are taking place in a demanding diplomatic environment, and the sensitivity and importance of this issue requires that detailed negotiations be conducted at all levels. It is not our policy to comment on diplomatic negotiations between foreign countries. As they are bilateral, the UK plays no part in them, but we are kept apprised of the outcomes as part of a wider discussion with the US on the progress of the ballistic missile defence programme. If these negotiations have implications for the UK, we will report them to Parliament.
	There have been reports in the international media that UK and US Governments are also discussing the basing of interceptors here in the UK. I say now that that is simply not true—there are no plans to base interceptors here. If in the future we decide that the acquisition of such technology becomes essential to the security of the United Kingdom, we will re-examine this position. This re-examination would come not from a desire to follow blindly the defence policy of other nations—as we have been accused of in the debate—but from a recognition of our need to ensure our national security against emerging threats.
	The Government have also made clear the role we believe that an effective missile defence system could play. We already contribute to the US system through the early warning information provided by RAF Fylingdales, and the information routed through RAF Menwith Hill, and we co-operate closely with the US on technology programmes.
	The Government have been criticised over the way that they announced the decision to allow US Governments to use the satellite relay station at RAF Menwith Hill to route early warning data to the missile defence system. The original decision to allow the US to use RAF Menwith Hill as a relay station for satellite data was taken in March 1997. The purpose of the relay station was then—and remains—to warn the UK and the US of any missile attack on our countries. What the Government agreed to recently was that the US could use this same satellite data in their missile defence system. The fact that satellite early warning information flows through RAF Menwith Hill has not changed. All that is different is that the US Government are now able to use this early warning information to inform their missile defence systems of possible missile launches from states of concern, and to assist in the interception of these missiles.
	The Written Statement that was given in another place on 25 July—it was quoted by my noble friend Lord Young in his excellent speech—was not "sneaked out" or "slipped out", as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire observed, or "buried", as the noble Lord, Lord Luke, stated. The Government's agreement to this arrangement was given in an exchange of classified letters between the US Defense Secretary, who wrote on 29 June 2007, and the Secretary of State for Defence, who replied on 16 July 2007. The timing of the announcement to the House on 25 July, just prior to the Summer Recess, was therefore entirely appropriate. The Ministry of Defence also produced a press release on the Written Statement on 26 July.
	Ballistic missile defence is not a weapon of first strike. It is not a sword, but a shield that could protect against the emerging threat of the long-range missiles that are being developed, or acquired, by states of concern—states that one day may wish to use them to harm NATO countries. The prospect of a nuclear, biological or chemical warhead detonating in Paris, Washington, Rome or London is horrendous, and I am sure that you will agree that we should strive to prevent this eventuality all costs. If there is anything that we as a Government can do to reduce this threat, we have a responsibility to do it.
	I was asked a number of questions by noble Lords. I will rattle through them as quickly as I can in the time I have, and I assure those noble Lords whose questions I do not answer that I will of course write to them.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked about the Prime Minister's Statement of February 2007, referring to the article in the Economist that suggested that the UK was negotiating with the US over the siting of MD interceptor missiles here. It was these proposals to which the Prime Minister was referring.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, also asked me about Germany's request for more multilateral discussions on missile defence, and stated that the UK had not responded. The UK provides regular updates on missile defence activities through NATO. This includes statements on UK policy and on missile defence, and updates on co-operation with the US on its BMD system.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said that my right honourable friend Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Defence, had misled the House on the issue of Menwith Hill. I strongly reject any suggestion that the Secretary of State for Defence misled Parliament over the request from the US for the use of Menwith Hill for missile defence proposals. In April last year, the UK Government had received no request from the US. A formal request was received in a letter from the US Defense Secretary, dated 29 June.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and other noble Lords, made strong points about the issue of sovereignty in relation to Menwith Hill. The Government take the issue of sovereignty extremely seriously. Menwith Hill is United Kingdom territory. The base is under the command of an RAF officer—there is no question of UK sovereignty being compromised.
	My Lords, we have had a good, in-depth debate on missile defence. Many issues were raised, and many interesting and informed questions asked, and I hope that I have provided satisfactory answers to as many of those questions as I could in the time. I will write to noble Lords whose questions I was unable to answer today. I will not go into detail about the operations at Menwith Hill, which are highly classified. However, I undertake to write to noble Lords on the matter in more detail.
	The noble Lords, Lord Wallace and Lord Marlesford, asked whether the UK will accept US interceptors if negotiations with Poland fail. There are no plans to offer the UK as a potential site for interceptor missiles should negotiations with the Polish Government fail. However, as the Secretary of State for Defence said in his Written Statement on 25 July, the UK,
	"will keep this under review as the threat evolves".—[Official Report, Commons, 25/7/07; col. 72WS.]
	My noble friend Lord Giddens asked about the threat to the UK from hosting missile defence assets. The 2003 report by the House of Commons Defence Committee agreed that the upgrade to Fylingdales would not increase the threat to the UK. Even with the US now able to use Menwith Hill to route early warning satellite data through its missile defence system, the Government feel that the situation has not changed. The US missile defence system is designed to counter a limited threat from a state of concern and these missiles would be limited in terms of numbers and their ability to accurately strike their target. It is felt that it is unlikely that a state with limited opportunities to strike against the US and her allies would wish to target a relatively small target such as a radar station, which it may not hit, when a large population centre offers a more attractive and potentially devastating target.
	The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, asked about the economic benefits to the UK from BMD. The UK signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2003 that allows bilateral information exchanges and co-operative work that prepares the way for fair opportunities to be given to UK industry in participation in US systems.
	The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, asked about the uranium enrichment bank. The UK accepts concerns about climate change, and the longer term availability and affordability of fossil fuels will lead to increased interest in the generation of nuclear power. We support the right of countries to undertake to develop nuclear technologies for safe, secure and peaceful uses. We are working on the creation of a viable, attractive and internationally agreed regime of nuclear fuel assurances under the auspices of the IAEA, which will make it unnecessary for nations to develop technically complex and expensive in-country enrichment and reprocessing facilities.
	I see that I am out of time. I still have a good bunch of questions to answer, and I will answer them in writing. I thank noble Lords for a rigorous, well-informed and robust debate.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, this has appropriately been a very sober debate, and I thank all noble Lords who have contributed, in particular the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Giddens, for their particularly useful and expert speeches. It is always a pleasure to be able to thank my former boss for the quality of his contribution to the debate.
	We on these Benches do not withdraw our criticism of the Government that we have had in effect contempt of Parliament on this issue. This is the first substantive debate on missile defence in either House for five years. To say that there has been the opportunity to table Written Questions in the interim does not provide an alternative, as the Government are well aware.
	The agreement to allow additional equipment at Menwith Hill was such a proposition, and to slip it out on the last day but one of Parliament sitting last July was, in our opinion, improper. The idea that the letter from the United States of 29 June came as a surprise out of the blue and that there had been no previous correspondence or discussions is a little hard to take. My suggestion about the Defence Secretary's Statement in late April was that of course discussions must have been under way then. The fact that that correspondence was completed on 16 July, after which there were seven sitting days of Parliament still remaining, allowed plenty of time for an earlier Statement, preferably an Oral Statement. It was not provided, and that was not adequate.
	We are not reassured by the use of that familiar phrase, "The UK has no plans". It has been used on many previous occasions while negotiations were under way, after which we are told, "Agreement has just been reached". I see that in the letter of 17 October from Des Browne to Sir Menzies Campbell, he wrote:
	"I can assure you that the Government has not made any decision about hosting interceptors in the UK, nor are there any plans for us to do so".
	That gives some substance to the suggestion by the Daily Telegraph that negotiations were indeed under way.
	We on these Benches have made some play of the sovereignty issue, and we will continue to do so, because the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, that we have little controversy in Britain about the effective subordination of sovereignty and security to the United States relates to the question of how far we share sovereignty with our partners in the European Union. We will come back to that. As to how much Menwith Hill remains subject to British control, I have had discussions with local MPs and county councillors in north Yorkshire about the degree of access that it is possible for anyone to have inside the wire at Menwith Hill and about the role of the MoD police, operating under US control, at Menwith Hill, which leave me extremely unhappy about the extent to which it remains effectively under British sovereignty.
	Several noble Lords have set out very powerfully our commitment to a multilateral approach, first within NATO and, secondly, within a broader context. The question of Iran has come up. Clearly, we need to address on another occasion—perhaps during a debate in this House—the question of how the West handled its relations with Iran.
	This House deserves a full debate on relations between the West—both NATO and the European Union—and Russia. I found the Foreign Affairs Committee report from the other place of last November on relations between Russia and the West extremely helpful in preparing my speech. I am conscious that currently there is an inquiry by our EU Committee under way on relations between Russia and the EU. When that report is complete, the Government should allow time in this House for a substantial debate not just on relations between Russia and the EU but on relations between Russia and NATO, so that we can address the many overlapping issues between the missile defence debate and the involvement of Russia in global security issues, about which we have concerns. Having made those points, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Energy Policy

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in the other place. The Statement is as follows:
	"With permission, Mr Speaker, I wish to make a Statement on UK energy policy. "Our strategy, as set out in our Energy White Paper last year, is designed to achieve two objectives: first, to ensure that the UK has secure energy supplies; and, secondly, together with other countries, to tackle the global challenge of climate change. "The competition for energy resources is increasing. Access to supplies across the world is becoming increasingly politicised. As a result, the cost of energy is rising. Few who have been exposed to the science of climate change now doubt the immediacy of the threat to our planet. As the UK shifts from being a net energy exporter to a net importer, our ability to source a diverse range of secure, competitively priced energy supplies will be one of the most important challenges that we face as a country—affecting our economy, our environment and ultimately our national security. "Our strategy to manage these risks is based on three elements: increasing energy efficiency, helping people and businesses to make a real contribution to solving the challenges we face; using the widest range of cleaner energy sources; and ensuring that the UK is as energy independent of any one supplier, country or technology as possible. Let me touch briefly on each of these. "We have already set out the measures we are taking on energy efficiency. These could result in carbon savings of between 25 million and 42 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020. We will keep these measures under review, going further and faster wherever we can. "We are also planning for the amount of UK electricity supplied from renewable sources to treble by 2015. The Energy Bill, published today, will strengthen the renewables obligation and help speed up the deployment of an even greater share of energy from renewable sources. Offshore wind, wave, and tidal power will all gain from this new approach. "The Government are also committed to funding one of the world's first commercial-scale demonstrations of carbon capture and storage. CCS is a technology that has the potential to make a critical contribution to tackling climate change. Measures in the Bill will enable this to move this forward. It is vital that, if we are to be as energy independent as possible, we must first continue to press the case for energy market liberalisation in the EU. We must, secondly, look to maximise economic domestic energy production and, finally, ensure that energy companies have the widest range of options open to them when it comes to investment in new, low-carbon power generation."Over the course of the next two decades we will need to replace a third of the UK's generating capacity, and by 2050 our electricity will need to be largely low carbon. So, we must be clear about the potential role of nuclear power. In October we concluded a full and extensive consultation across the UK, seeking people's views on whether new nuclear power should play a continuing role in providing Britain with the energy it needs. Today I am publishing the Government's response in the form of a White Paper alongside our analysis of the comments we received."I can confirm today that, having carefully considered the responses, the Government believe that new nuclear power stations should have a role to play in this country's future energy mix alongside other low-carbon sources. The view of the Government is that it is in the public interest to allow energy companies the option of investing in new nuclear power stations and that we should therefore take the active steps necessary to facilitate this."Nuclear power has provided us with safe and secure supplies of electricity for half a century. It is one of the very few proven low-carbon technologies which can provide baseload electricity. Nuclear power currently provides us with around 19 per cent of our electricity."Nuclear power will help us meet our twin energy challenges: ensuring secure supplies and tackling climate change. First, a continuing role for nuclear power will contribute to the diversity of our energy supplies. Secondly, it will help us meet our emissions reduction targets. Every new nuclear power station will save the same amount of carbon emissions that are generated from around 1 million households. The entire lifecycle emissions of nuclear—that is, from uranium mining through to waste management— are only between 2 per cent and 6 per cent of those from gas for every unit of electricity generated. Thirdly, nuclear power will reduce the costs of meeting our energy goals. Analysis of future gas and carbon price scenarios shows that nuclear is affordable and provides one of the cheapest electricity options available to reduce our carbon emissions. Our energy suppliers recognise this and that—in a world of carbon prices and high fossil fuel prices—nuclear power makes commercial sense."For those reasons I do not intend to set some sort of artificial cap on the proportion of electricity the UK should be able to generate either from nuclear power or from any other source of low-carbon energy. That would not be consistent with our long-term national interest. Given that nuclear power is a tried and tested, safe and secure form of low-carbon technology, it would be wrong in principle to rule it out now from playing any role in the UK's energy future."Not surprisingly, however, some important concerns were expressed during the consultation about nuclear power. These concerns fell into four broad categories: safety and security, waste management, costs, and the impact of nuclear power on investment in alternative low-carbon technologies. "Ensuring the safety and security of new nuclear will remain a top priority. Having reviewed the evidence put forward and the advice of independent regulators, we are confident that we have a robust regulatory framework. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that our regulatory framework is mature, flexible and transparent, with highly trained and experienced inspectors. But it is right that we should work closely with the regulators to explore ways of enhancing their efficiency in dealing with new nuclear power stations. I am keen to ensure that the UK has the most effective regulatory regime in the world. I believe that it could be a critical differentiator for the UK in securing access to international investment in new nuclear facilities. I have asked Dr Tim Stone to take this work forward alongside his continuing work on the financial arrangements regarding new nuclear power stations "During the consultation, many argued that a permanent solution for dealing with existing waste must be developed before new waste is created. Having fully considered the evidence, our conclusion is that geological disposal is both technically possible and the right approach for managing existing and new higher-activity waste. It will be many years before a disposal facility is built. But we are satisfied that interim storage will hold waste from existing and any new power stations safely and securely for as long as is necessary. In addition, before development consents for new nuclear power stations are granted, the Government will need to be satisfied that effective arrangements exist or will exist to manage and dispose of the waste they will produce."The third concern related to cost. It will be for energy companies, not government, to fund, develop and build new nuclear power stations, including meeting the full costs of decommissioning and each operator's full share of waste management costs. The Bill includes provisions to ensure that. Transparency in the operation of these arrangements will be essential. In order to increase public and industry confidence we will establish a new independent body to advise on the financial arrangements to cover operators' waste and decommissioning costs. The advice of this new body will be made public. "The nuclear White Paper published today sets out a clear timetable for action to enable the building of the first new nuclear power station, which I hope will be completed well before 2020. The Planning Bill will improve the speed and efficiency of the planning system for nationally significant infrastructure, including new nuclear power stations, while giving local people a greater opportunity to have their say. A strategic siting assessment, to be completed by 2009, will help identify the most suitable sites for new build. We expect that applications will focus on areas in the vicinity of existing nuclear facilities. Work is already under way on assessing the safety of the new generation of reactors. Finally, we must work with our EU partners to strengthen the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to give potential investors confidence in a continuing carbon market. We look forward to the Commission's proposals later this month."I remain firmly of the view that there should and will be room for all forms of low-carbon power technologies to play a role in helping the UK meet its energy objectives in the future. Nuclear power can be only one aspect of our energy mix. On its own it cannot resolve all of the challenges we face. Meeting these challenges requires the full implementation of our energy and climate change strategy, with nuclear taking its place alongside other low-carbon technologies. "The Energy Bill will ensure that we have a legislative framework enabling all these technologies to make a positive contribution to our future requirements for cleaner, more secure energy. Giving the go-ahead today that new nuclear power should play a role in providing the UK with clean, secure and affordable energy is in our country's vital long-term interest. I therefore invite energy companies to bring forward plans to build and operate new nuclear power stations. Set against the challenges of climate change and security of supply, the evidence in support of new nuclear power stations is compelling. We should positively embrace the opportunity of delivering this important part of our energy policy. I commend the Statement to the House".
	My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

Baroness Wilcox: My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement on UK energy policy. We on these Benches are always happy when government policy is so close to our views that we can establish a responsible consensus on matters of importance.
	Tragically, for 10 years, under the predecessors of the noble Lord, Lord Jones, nothing serious was done to address the vital issue of our energy security. Those truly were 10 wasted Labour years, and now the noble Lord leaps into action. How he must relish his freedom from party caucuses on a difficult issue such as this.
	This issue is now a matter of the highest priority. These small steps towards establishing a framework that protects our climate from rising carbon emissions and ensures that this country will not suffer a future energy shortfall are long overdue. If we are to have costly long-term investment, there must be a framework of political stability in which to invest. The private sector should know that any investment in new nuclear power stations on the basis of this policy will be safe under a future Conservative Government. Although I think the noble Lord will agree with me that few in this House anticipate the nightmare of a Liberal Government, I hope we shall hear the same assurance of policy security for investors from the Liberal Benches. They should not take risks with our nation's energy security.
	On refining the planning system, setting a price for carbon to ensure a long-term climate for investment and for establishing a clear policy for nuclear waste and decommissioning, our priorities are very similar to those of the Government. We share the view that any new nuclear industry must be subsidy-free.
	We inevitably have questions. The Statement identified nuclear power as a proven low-carbon technology that will contribute to energy diversity in an affordable manner. Can the Minister therefore state confidently that the Government's policy will now lead to private investment in new nuclear power stations? When does he expect the first nuclear stations to come on stream, and how many existing installations representing what percentage of our energy needs will have been decommissioned by that date?
	There are many pitfalls ahead that will make building a new generation of nuclear power stations difficult. Does the Minister not agree that our national skills base is impossibly low? Where will the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate recruit, train and keep the necessary number of skilled employees to assess and approve reactors for the necessary licences? How much power do the Government intend to give the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate to require design adjustments to the application rather than simply accepting or rejecting them?
	I also have questions about the new advisory board. How much authority and power will it have over new-build projects and why do the Government not intend to give it a statutory basis?
	I should like to probe the Minister further on the Government's commitment that any new nuclear power plant must be built without any subsidy, whether on waste disposal or guaranteed off-take agreements. The Statement is rather unclear on whether companies will be held responsible for all future waste management and disposal, or merely for the current practice of using interim storage until a facility for geological disposal is built. How will the Government protect the taxpayer from becoming responsible for these costs if they are higher than anticipated or if the company should go bankrupt? What price Northern Rock one day being followed by a "Nuclear Rock"? Would the Government intervene in the same way?
	There also appears to be inconsistency between the Government's statement that nuclear power is a low-carbon source of energy and their continuing insistence that the climate change levy insists that it should deserve a carbon penalty. Can the Minister explain this? Can he also confirm that the Government still have no intention to bolster the EU Emissions Trading Scheme with something more robust? And will they really not consider underpinning this scheme with a carbon tax?
	In view of the interruption to gas supplies by Russia for essentially political reasons, have the Government made any risk assessment of European Union reliance on Russian gas? The Minister is a big traveller—does he have any plans to go to Russia to discuss these matters soon?
	I thank the Minister for the White Paper; I look forward to studying both it and the Energy Bill. There is much in it that we agree with—for example, the importance of energy efficiency—but it is clear that the Government still need more encouragement, especially with microgeneration and energy decentralisation. And why will they not support our policy on smart meters?
	Today's Statement gives me hope that the Government are finally taking climate change and energy security more seriously. I look forward to working with the Minister as he bangs his famous drum and gets a grip on what has been his department's lax and careless attitude to our energy security over the past 10 years.

Lord Redesdale: My Lords, I thank the Minister, and thank the noble Baroness as well for the happy thought of a Liberal Government in the foreseeable future. That is a wonderful post-Christmas thought.
	The noble Baroness said that the Opposition have been firm in supporting nuclear power. I found that rather strange; I have been present for a large number of these Statements over the past few years and the Conservative Party has not been quite as firm in its support of nuclear policy as has been suggested. Indeed, in some cases, it has almost joined the Liberal Democrats in their scepticism. But I find, yet again, that I am on my own on these Benches regarding scepticism about nuclear power. This attitude is based not on some luddite view of nuclear power but on very real concerns. When it was first introduced we were told that it would be too cheap to meter. The billions of pounds spent on waste management since then leads us to question the claims that nuclear power is the cheap option.
	We often ask far too many questions, but I have one specific question which I hope the Minister can answer today. The Statement is not a surprise. We have been waiting for it through the publication of two White Papers. It was heralded in the press not as UK energy policy but the go-ahead for nuclear power stations. Will any subsidy be built into the package for building new nuclear power stations? Will that include setting the carbon cost? That would be a subsidy in itself over the long term—we could be talking about 30 to 50 years. If that were set, and new low-carbon technology was introduced, we would still be paying a rather heavy price for nuclear power.
	As everyone has stated, and we recognise, the benefit of nuclear is reduced carbon dioxide emissions. But there is a question mark over the cost, which could cause a problem in the coal and gas industries. We tend to forget in these debates that we rely heavily on coal and gas. As the price of gas goes up, we might well increase the amount of coal we use. Carbon storage and capture will be an expensive technology to develop. If all the money is spent in the nuclear pot it is possible that the Government will take their eye off the ball. I very much hope that carbon storage and capture and the development of clean coal technology is not forgotten.
	The Statement mentioned energy efficiency as a primary goal, which I very much welcome, and the Government's commitment to renewals. The Statement mentions offshore tidal and wave power, which is very welcome. However, have the Government backed away from fighting the battles for onshore wind energy? It is much cheaper and, in carbon terms, much easier to fix a turbine onshore than out at sea.
	Two other issues arise. One of the issues about which we are particularly concerned is waste. I notice that figures were given for the carbon cost of building a nuclear power station as against gas, but I do not see how they were arrived at. I very much hope that the Minister will put in the Library the document on which they are based because we still do not know what the carbon cost of deep-level storage—which will have to be built and maintained—will be. We are still talking about that being decades into the future. There will be a rather nasty carbon sting in the tail for dealing with waste over many decades.
	Finally, obviously the easier sites in which to place nuclear power stations is where they are at the moment and, of course, there is a good deal of support among local communities for the continuation of employment. However, if you believe in climate change you also believe in rising sea levels. Nuclear power stations are always built on the coast. When the siting report is looked at, will a great deal of consideration be given to how much cost and effort will be needed in constructing sea defences for nuclear power stations? If much effort needs to be expended in constructing sea defences, that will have a major knock-on effect for communities situated near those coastal stations.

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I assure both the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, that I forgive them for their generous, after-Christmas approach in hoping for a Conservative or Liberal Government. However, in a bout of January meanness, I assure them that that is not on this Government's agenda.
	I especially thank the noble Baroness for the support of the Conservatives for the nuclear programme. She is absolutely right that if this is going to be a question of private sector investment, it has to have the assurance of a very long-term, cohesive approach from both Houses as to the environment in which they can invest. The Government thank her for that.
	Noble Lords can be confident that this will be a question of private sector investment and the technological solutions that go with it. Indeed, at the moment, as the noble Baroness was kind enough to say, I go round the world banging a drum. I am proud to be able to bang the drum and sell the environmental technological solutions for so much of climate change. Those are British solutions being sold round the world.
	We hope that 2020 will be the maximum date for the commissioning of the first nuclear power station and that in fact that will occur in 2017 or 2018. We are looking at that timescale. I assure the noble Baroness that there will be no subsidy from the taxpayer. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, asked the valid question whether that included any hidden subsidy. If we work on increasing the price of carbon, that on its own is not a government subsidy but acts to make the nuclear option even more cost-efficient.
	The noble Baroness asked me what reduction is expected in nuclear capacity for generation. Currently, it is 10.2 gigawatts of nuclear capacity in this nation. By 2020 that will reduce to 3.6 gigawatts if we do nothing about it. We all want a more efficient European Emissions Trading Scheme. It was a British design and drive and it is being bought into, but at nowhere near enough the correct level. It must be bought into and driven forward even more if this nation is to benefit from it. Incidentally, I say as an aside to the noble Baroness that every time I go to Russia I feel proud about the energy equation as regards this nation. We have some world-class players making a difference there as well.
	I point out to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, that we will not in any way, shape or form take our eye off the ball of what I call the mix. That is the mix of carbon capture and storage, the mix of offshore wind farm development, the mix of energy conservation and the education of the next generation in that—that must not be forgotten—and the mix of the stimulation of technological solutions to so much of the problem. Nuclear is not on its own the solution to this any more than any of the other methods. As regards the noble Lord's question on the strategic siting assessment, we hope that that will report, after consultation, by April of this year; it is that quick. His points about siting and its implications, especially with regard to sea levels, will be taken into account in that. The analysis of the White Paper, which comprises a separate booklet, will be placed in the Library to assist noble Lords with the relevant figures.

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the welcome Statement and draw attention to the interests that I declared in the register. I am very pleased that, before the publication of this White Paper, the difficulties which the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate had with the Treasury were resolved and that a fair number of the new staff will be able to be recruited so that the examination of nuclear reactors will be carried out very rapidly. That is critical to the 2017 target date of which my noble friend spoke. He correctly identified the low emissions from nuclear generation as compared with gas. Could he tell us whether the climate change levy will continue to be imposed on the nuclear industry, given the Government's now public admission that such a small amount of CO2 comes from the generation of nuclear power, and that this is a burden which the industry should not necessarily have to carry at this time, given the low emissions for which it is responsible?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, my noble friend raises a very valid point. During my time at the CBI I was intimately involved with the formation of the climate change levy. I do not know whether the nuclear industry will be exempt from the levy for the reasons that he gave. I promise to provide him with a full answer on that as soon as I have found it out.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, I welcome the Statement. Does the Minister recall that 28 years ago I announced to the House of Commons a programme of approval of 13 new pressurised water-reactor nuclear power stations, of which only one ever got built, and that was 12 years after my announcement? How will he ensure that the same thing does not happen again and that a slightly better performance occurs? Can he say a little more about what the design that gets the Government's approval is likely to be, because the key to all this is that it should be a serial system of faster build, with more common systems that are more easily inspected and with safety more guaranteed? What kind of design will the Government choose? Many designs nowadays are very different from the PWRs that I was talking about. How will the Government reach a decision on that, because last time we had a huge battle over which design to go for? We need to know that this time, otherwise nothing will happen.

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that one reason why our proposal will not suffer the same fate as that he mentioned is that this nation cannot afford that. We are at five to midnight in terms of how we renew this country's generating capacity to keep the light on in every respect, and there is a sense of urgency in every part of our society. It will be a totally different situation this time. The noble Baroness was kind enough to say that I have had the privilege of presenting this measure to your Lordships' House, and I shall devote every effort to it that I possibly can.
	I should explain that there is a generic design consultation. The process for selecting the reactor design for that will occur in spring this year. It is that quick. At the moment we are looking at four different sorts—one from Canada, one from France and two from America. This is absolutely key to making the whole thing work. Interestingly, yesterday Sizewell B completed approximately 450 days of continuous 24/7 generation. That is world class and that is what we shall try to achieve in the future.

The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford: My Lords, will the Minister comment on some issues that might be said to arise from a moral and ethical set of concerns in this area? I recognise that moral and ethical language will deal with matters of balance and risk. The Statement spoke of there being no cap on how much nuclear energy might supply our future energy needs. Do the Government have a working view of the contribution to our future energy supplies that might be supplied by different kinds of provision? Having worked in South Yorkshire, I am very interested in coal. Every interference that one makes in the natural world has losses as well as gains associated with it. Do the Government have a working understanding of how the proportions might work in the future? What is the limit on the nuclear contribution?
	Secondly, in terms of the risks, I was little concerned that the Statement said that there is no foreseeable resolution to the geological issue surrounding the management of waste. It sounded as though the Minister was saying, "We think we can contain it until we find a solution". Perhaps he could give us a little more confidence that the management of the risk surrounding nuclear waste is under better control in Her Majesty's Government's thinking and practice.

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, the right reverend Prelate raises a very valid point on justification in the interests of the nation: the ability for us to keep the lights on, to compete in the world and to have the power, mixed with the moral and ethical standards to which the right reverend Prelate rightly refers. In March 2008, we will issue a call for the justification applications; that process meets the requirements of EU regulation that new nuclear processes should demonstrate that their benefits outweigh any other possible social, health and ethical detriment. That is taken very seriously by this Government and will be dealt with accordingly. On geological issues, I would like to reassure the right reverend Prelate that I did not use the words, "I think it will be all right". I do not deal with uncertainty in that way. The geological disposal situation is the one on which the Government have decided and we are satisfied that that is the right way forward.

Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, the Minister will not be in the least bit surprised to hear that I warmly support the Statement as an important step towards new nuclear build, a much needed low-carbon based energy source. However—and I have given the Minister's office notice of this question—is he aware that when Sir John Harman, chairman of the Environment Agency, addressed a nuclear audience shortly before Christmas—the Environment Agency is one of the most significant of the Government's agencies—he rather startled his audience when he made it clear that the EA will not approve any new nuclear build until the Government have given a long-term commitment to the finance for dealing with nuclear waste? The noble Lord will recognise that that goes way beyond the phrase in the Statement about being satisfied that effective arrangements exist? If the Environment Agency has to be taken seriously, as I think it does, is there not a risk that the timetable for new nuclear build and the timetable for achieving the financial commitment for which it is asking are totally inconsistent? When will the White Paper on nuclear waste be produced and will it resolve this apparent inconsistency?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, not only for that remark but also for the notice that he gave me of that question. I have three points on that. There is no point in having a powerful, well recognised, one-of-the-best-ever environment agencies and not expect it to be the custodian of that which it is appointed to look after. Secondly, I think it shared our view. I do not believe that this is inconsistent at all. Basically, it is saying that having a mechanism for the long-term management of radioactive waste is absolutely essential and that it will not allow the private sector to start building or funding that unless it can prove that it has the cash put aside to deal with the waste disposal issue. As we set out in the White Paper, our policy is that before those development consents for new nuclear power stations are granted, we will need to be satisfied that effective arrangements exist or will exist to manage and to dispose of the waste. I know that the noble Lord shares my view of "Come on, get on with it". It is so important here. Our full response towards managing radioactive waste safely—consultation—will be produced by the end of this spring. We are not dragging our feet.

Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, first, will my noble friend summarise the penalties that the country would pay if we were not to proceed with what is suggested? Secondly, will he confirm that the degree of safety, which concerns much of the public, has been considerably enhanced since Chernobyl? Has not the whole situation changed since then? Thirdly, has not the price of the Government's proposals been grossly exaggerated by some who for political reasons oppose those proposals?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the observations on whether there has been an exaggeration of the cost in relation to this issue. Those with vested interests in various parts of society who allow their prejudices and philosophical objections to get in the way of the harsh realities and facts of this matter will always be convenient with the truth. My noble friend is absolutely right to say that the type of reactors that will be commissioned, manufactured and installed by the private sector will be utterly different from those in place at the time of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. They are much more efficient and safe and much more dependable in providing base load electricity for our children and their children.
	On the first point made by my noble friend, I point out that one of the most important parts of all this is that this, the fifth biggest economy on earth, has to go forward in an uncertain world very sure that it can be secure in its energy supply compared with getting energy from countries that are less stable, have different views and make us very vulnerable. We have to ensure that our people can keep the lights on, notwithstanding what other countries do.

Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market: My Lords, I too warmly welcome the Statement. It is long overdue but at last it is here. I declare an indirect interest in that I am chairman of the trustees of the British Energy pension funds. I have a question about offshore wind to which the Minister briefly referred. In a recent speech to a European conference, the Secretary of State was widely reported as indicating a massive increase in the programme for offshore wind—I stress "offshore", as the Minister did in the Statement. Can he say something about the priority that the Government attach to the programme for offshore wind, which seems to involve a substantial number of wind turbines all around our shores?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, raises a point that enables me to assure noble Lords that we will support the growth of offshore renewables. We will create additional powers, enabling Ofgem to administer an efficient and effective regulatory regime for offshore electricity transmission to connect large scale offshore renewable projects to the onshore electricity network. We see that as key and part of the mix. We will not ignore it but we shall stimulate further offshore investment.

Baroness Howe of Idlicote: My Lords, I also support what has, at last, been achieved after so many years of uncertainty. The management of nuclear waste is clearly of enormous concern. However, some believe that it has the potential for further energy use well into the future. Perhaps the Minister will say a word about that.

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I can assure the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that the storage going forward will of its own create the opportunities for businesses to invest in technological solutions to what is an essential problem in the whole mix. We do not think that we have a multitude of answers at the moment; we are choosing the geological solution. These are all very long-term issues, and in that long-term time frame other technological solutions on all aspects will come forward—not just on waste disposal but on what happens immediately after generation. The door is open to ideas and investment in those ideas to find a technological solution.

Lord Dubs: My Lords, I give the Statement a broad welcome, but wonder whether I can press my noble friend on one point. He said that four different designs were under review. I understand that one of the strengths of the French nuclear industry is that there is a standard design for all French power stations, which results in economies of scale and other improvements in efficiency. Will we settle for one design, or several?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, the swift answer is that I do not know, but I know that four are being looked at. In talking about the French, it is important that people who oppose this proposal understand that right now this nation is using nuclear-generated power, and will continue to do so, even if we never use nuclear generated electricity for a long time to come. It comes from some 100 miles from London; it is called France.—

Lord Dixon-Smith: My Lords, I welcome the Statement and in doing so want to question the Minister on a slightly different aspect. The Statement properly mentions energy efficiency in relation to tackling climate change and everything else. The electricity generating industry itself wastes more energy—which it vents to the atmosphere—than it supplies to its customers. What plans do the Government have to deal with that anomaly? I accept that it is difficult to deal with it in relation to existing plant, but when we are considering new generating capacity, this matter should be properly taken into account and dealt with.

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that it will be taken into account and it will be dealt with. The consultations—particularly Dr Tim Stone's work—will take that into account. I should point out that we have to continue with educating and training people in energy use. That is to be part of the mix. It is interesting to note that building a nuclear power station puts less carbon into the environment than building a wind farm.

Lord Truscott: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that without the Government's Statement and White Paper the ageing nuclear power stations that we have in the country today would probably be replaced with gas-fired power stations which would have much higher emissions of CO2? Will he take this opportunity to assure the House that the Government will not be blown off course in their efforts to tackle climate change and secure our energy supplies by any legal challenge by Greenpeace or any other NGO?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I can give my noble friend that assurance on both counts—vigorously on the second. On the first, it is important that the leaders of our society make it clear to the country that we have no alternative but to accept a mix and to choose methods that will not put more carbon into the environment as we generate electricity for our children.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I, too, welcome the Statement and thank my noble friend for making it. I follow up on the important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, and ask my noble friend whether he is satisfied that there will not be a lengthy gap in ensuring that there are effective arrangements to dispose of the waste product. That has obviously come up in the consultation, as the Statement makes it clear that it is one of the main points at issue. The point about not having a long gap and being ready to go on planning consents rather than being held up is enormously important. Secondly, can my noble friend give us a timescale on when we can expect Dr Tim Stone to report on the issues he is dealing with?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I assure my noble friend that there will be no gap. Many of the private sector companies engaged in this are already working to take it forward immediately. My noble friend is absolutely right that that is a key issue, and we will ensure that there is not a gap. Dr Tim Stone has today been reappointed, as I said in the Statement, and he has been told effectively to get on with it. I do not know when he will report, but I will get back to my noble friend on that.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: My Lords, do the Government intend the nuclear power industry to be treated in every way the same as renewable energy sources under the non-fossil fuel obligation on our power supply companies?

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I can certainly give my noble friend that assurance.

Lord Christopher: My Lords, I remind noble Lords of the interest that I have declared in this area. I follow that question on the treatment of the nuclear industry with a question on costs. I have no difficulty with what the White Paper says, but will there be a level playing field? Will the other sources of green energy contribute equally to those areas that are not directly in the costs? For example, I refer to the need for back-up and the infrastructure with wind power.
	I have two points beyond that. Several colleagues have referred to waste, and I shall, if I may, extend the point that was made from the Cross Benches. Recently there appears to have been a good deal of work done on what to do with waste other than bury it. I believed that nuclear waste was exactly that in perpetuity until I met a man in Stoke-on-Trent who bought a large hole and sold its contents of waste three times at a useful profit. Two things seem to have happened. First, scientists have proposed that nuclear waste can be used in future reactors. Indeed, one has gone as far as saying that if the conclusions are correct, Britain could use its nuclear stations throughout this century free of cost in terms of fuel. It is important that the design of the reactors used should fit that bill.
	Secondly, it is extremely important that nuclear produces hydrogen. The Americans have been producing hydrogen in submarines for the purposes of the environment.

Lord Bach: My Lords, I hope that my noble friend will forgive me. I hate to interrupt him but we have reached 20 minutes. My noble friend will answer his noble friend's comments but the House must move on. I wonder whether he can come to his final point.

Lord Christopher: My Lords, I shall leave it there.

Lord Bach: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend.

Lord Jones of Birmingham: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that walk through the possibilities of what we can do with waste in the future. It neatly dovetails with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, about what, going forward, we are going to do with waste. There will be times in the next century when we find that there are technological solutions that can not only make a profit but can probably help in generating future electricity. As for the question of a level playing field for the treatment of low-carbon generative capacity from nuclear power and low-carbon generative capacity from wind, tidal, solar or biomass power, I wish people would understood—and I hope Scotland is listening—that even Scotland is not windy 24/7.

Local Government: Community Empowerment

Lord Greaves: rose to call attention to the Action Plan for Community Empowerment: Building on Success and to the case for more initiatives to build sustainable local democratic structures and communities; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, I thank the small group of stalwarts who have put their names down to speak in this debate. I am sure quality will reign over quantity. In particular, I am very much looking forward to the maiden speech from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. I thank my party, the Liberal Democrats, for allowing me to move this on a Liberal Democrat afternoon.
	I have been involved in local campaigning and local democracy for about 40 years, which seems a horrific length of time. During that time, the terminology that people use has changed. We now talk about community empowerment and citizen engagement—or, at least, the Government do. Last year, they talked about double devolution, a silly phrase which has gone off to the Foreign Office or somewhere like that. When I started out in local government and local campaigning 40 years ago, most of my colleagues on the council would have referred to it all simply as "a damned nuisance" and seen it as people trying to get involved with things that had nothing to do with them. They should know that these other people were councillors.
	However, my first message for the Government is to ask them, please, to start using plain English. Having read the report we are debating today, I had a vision of someone saying to their husband or wife, "I'm just off down the neighbourhood hub for a bit of community empowerment. We have been quality assured by the national empowerment partnership, and tonight we are embedding our practitioner learning and capturing and sharing it through the national neighbourhood management network". I hope the idea of all this is not to get people to talk in this way, because they will not. I have a basic principle in life: if people use silly words, they are probably talking a load of nonsense. If the Government want to persuade me that they are not talking nonsense, can they please use decent words? I am not a sceptic about this; I am a huge enthusiast, as I was when the Minister's political colleagues were very much against it. However, if we are all moving forward and believe that involving residents—which is what I would say—is a good thing and that there ought to be a lot more of it, then let us all work together.
	I have been thinking about my credentials for having the gall to stand up and initiate this debate: I was involved in student and youth politics in the 1960s, as no doubt many noble Lords were, because of our generation. I exempt the Ministers on the Government Front Bench, who were probably at primary school at the time from that. There was a feeling in the 1960s that people ought to be a lot more involved and a lot more people got involved. In some cases it meant radical direct action throughout the world; in some cases it meant the growth of amenity groups. In 1970 I had privilege, as chair of the Young Liberals, of moving the community politics motion at the Liberal assembly, committing the Liberal Party to a policy of what we then called—and still call—community politics. It meant bringing together the politics of the street and the politics of the neighbourhood with the politics of elected bodies. This is absolutely crucial to the whole of this debate. If it works properly, what happens in the community and what happens on elected bodies—and now all the local quangos, and so on—have a direct link with each other. This is not always easy but it is very important.
	On Monday evening I was in a slightly different position. I was at a public meeting, attended by around 100 people in the ward I represent on Pendle council, to present two people in the area with the South Valley Masterplan, a regeneration plan for that area. Here was I, who, when I was first elected to the council was with the people, mounting the barricades and assaulting the town hall, now managing public involvement in a very new Labour sort of way. Nevertheless, it was managed consultation that happened very successfully, and always with the understanding that if people do not agree with it, they are willing to say so and campaign against it. We were not storming the town hall, but rather "managing consultation". In those days, we used to think that there was a real dichotomy between these two approaches, that what some people used to call a patronising attitude to getting people involved was quite different from direct action. That has never been the case. They will always be on a continuum. It is important that when government, of all people, and the state are encouraging people to get involved, they must realise and understand that it cannot all be controlled and managed. Some of it will get very messy.
	My second message for the Government is that involving people is not always easy or comfortable. Because people will get angry about what is proposed, and feel that the world and the state are against them, they will oppose what is going on. They will still storm the town hall, or whatever other bodies are involved, on occasion. The old attitude was to keep them out—keep them at arm's length—and it would be okay. The new attitude is to invite them in. But whether you invite them or keep them out, it will not always be comfortable. By all means, we must encourage people to use the available channels and to engage in dialogue; that is the advantage of inviting people in. But there are times when people will get angry, and it will get messy. It is not all working tea parties in the vicarage. It is sometimes a matter of resolving local conflict, which is not always comfortable for people in power at all.
	I remember 1990, when the poll tax came in and I was leader of the council for a couple of years. We had to institute the poll tax. The people wanted us to say that we were not going to send the bills out or take part in this but, as we were running the council, that was an impossible position. People said "okay" in droves; the turnout went up hugely at the election and we were all voted out, and somebody else had to run the poll tax. People have a right to protest and a right to anger. It is not always easy, but you must still do it because it is the right way.
	My third message for the Government is that they should think carefully about what they mean when they use the word "community". There is a romantic, rosy-eyed notion of community, of tea on the vicarage lawn; I apologise to the right reverend Prelates for these references, but they will know what I mean. At a local level, the community is who lives there; it is everybody. It is not the people who happen to be organised in groups, although they are part of it. It is not national NGOs and their local representatives, although they are part of it. It is everybody and all the organisations. We must always remember this. The Government talks in the local government White Paper of wanting,
	"a voluntary agreement between a local authority and a local community",
	for local charters. I do not know what they mean by "local community" in that context—as a body that can "voluntarily" enter into an agreement. There is a lot of woolly thinking about it.
	Who gets involved? Well, if there is a major issue, you get hundreds of people involved. We had a big issue where I live about proposals to remove a fire engine last year. A majority in the town signed the petition. Again, in around 1990 or 1991, we were campaigning against the proposals of the then Tory Government to close the local hospital in Colne. It was a huge campaign. We had a public meeting which I chaired, with about 350 to 400 people crammed into the sports hall, where our local MP, John Lee—who is now of course my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford—came and gave what support he could to the campaign. He did not have much choice, really; he could either stay away or give support. There was huge local anger.
	However, that is not the kind of engagement that the Government are thinking of. That is oppositional; it is campaigning to stop people closing things and doing things, which is what gets people worked up. If you have projects, if you are proposing to spend £5 million in an area—or even £30 million to £40 million over a period in regeneration areas, which is true of some I am involved with—people will get involved; not in huge numbers, but quite a lot will come to exhibitions. A sufficient number will take part in a local group to work with the council, or whatever other authorities, to see it through.
	However, when you get to those who will attend meetings month by month and get involved at that level, particularly if there are no huge projects going on, you really are down to the committed few to keep it going. Are they the community? If so, are they representative? If not, how do you make important decisions about priorities? The Liberal Democrats say that that is where elected councillors come in. You cannot keep them out of the process, because they are elected to mediate between the different demands and views in the community and, ultimately, make choices; not locked away in smoke-filled rooms—as they would not be now—or otherwise, but as part and parcel of community decision-making processes.
	When nothing much is going on, there are people who are dormant but still interested. As a ward councillor, I send out an e-mail newsletter every week or fortnight about everything going on in the ward that I know about—planning applications, items on agendas and so on. Over 100 people now are happy to receive that, and only one person has ever cancelled it. That kind of provision of information to people is good because when something crops up, there are a lot more people who know about it and turn up.
	The Government may want to stimulate a lot of public involvement; they have done one thing recently that will do far more than all this to achieve that; that is, the recent local government finance settlement. This really puts the squeeze on some councils for the first time in some years. There will, for example, be library closures, community centre closures and cuts in local services of all kinds. That will get people going; I am not quite sure that this is the way the Government want to do it.
	I talked about priorities and the importance of councillors, and my noble friends will go into that a bit more.
	When I read the Government's papers, where are the references to political parties? Which are the bodies that, for all their faults and lack of members nowadays, provide the engine room for activism in the community in so many places? The Government and the people who write all these papers seem to think that political parties can be written out of the equation; they hope that they will go away, leaving nice community involvement and engagement with citizens, without the sort of conflicts, arguments and rows that political parties bring along. I have got news for them: if that is what they think, they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Political parties, activists and elected representatives are a crucial part of political involvement and engagement in a community. They are a crucial part of the way the community works in determining opinions, who turns out to get involved in particular issues—whether it is oppositional or managed—and of course who gets elected to the council.
	My next message for the Government—I think that it is number five, but I have lost count—is that, with regard to involving people or community engagement or whatever it is called, you have got to look at it in all kinds of communities, neighbourhoods and areas. There is a temptation to say that neighbourhood management is a new trendy thing and we will do it in the deprived or disadvantaged areas—what we used to call the poor areas. If you are going to do it, you have to do it everywhere, and this needs resources. The disadvantaged areas are the ones where perhaps there are fewer resources in the community itself, but whether you are talking about add-on projects such as putting in neighbourhood management schemes, or just trying to do things in a more local way in your normal, mainstream services, that still needs extra resources. At a time when the Government are demanding that councils impose 3 per cent annual efficiency cuts, it is very difficult to find those resources. If there is a choice between cutting a service or delivering that service in a different way, most councils will go for not cutting the service—that is just the way it is.
	I have used up my time. I wish the Government well. My final message is: do not believe that you can do this top-down; you can't. Page 29 of the report says,
	"we must increase people's influence over service provision and local decisions".
	You can't do that; you can encourage, you can stimulate, you can provide the structures that make it more possible, but when it comes down to it you need people on the ground, politicians and the people who run organisations, who are enthusiastically in favour of it, and who accept—as the Government have to accept—that it will be untidy and messy. The Government can get over that by calling it diversity in practice, but it will still be untidy and messy, and in some places it will not work. Yet where it does work, it is the most fantastic thing in the world. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, here endeth the first lesson. Verily, verily, I say unto you: lift up your hearts. I have been enormously impressed by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, because, as always, one knows the way in which one speaks. You know that you are listening to the voice of experience. He referred to the stalwarts who have gathered here; I call us the repertory company and this is the green room. We are examining where we go from here.
	I was delighted to detect from the tone of what the noble Lord said that he is giving some marks to the Government for attempting to deal with a deteriorating position in participatory democracy. I have an interest to declare, which is registered, relating to the Co-operative group. I do not want to speak about the Co-operative group, but I plead in aid my experience in the Co-operative movement over many years.
	I was lucky, when I began to have an interest in those matters, to do so during wartime, when there was youth National Service, and in the post-war period, when works and factory cycling and rambling groups contributed to the ethos of young people—and, of course, the churches played a powerful part in providing youth organisations. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred to the political parties. I joined the Labour Party when I was 16. I attended meetings of other parties. I was the Prime Minister of the Tyneside Youth Parliament for a period. My involvement was all natural: it was there and I participated. Sadly, when one looks at the role of local government, national government and organisations, including the churches, the Co-op, and everyone else, it is a new world—it is different.
	When we talk about empowerment, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is absolutely right; I like to use "ownership". I think that one of the great contributions made by the Co-op movement, for instance—the noble Lord knows very well about Rochdale, the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 and the birth of the Co-op movement; it has a democratic basis of one member, one vote—is that provided many people with an idea of participating. They would not have used a grand word like "participation" or "involvement", but when they went to their local Co-op store, they knew that it was their Co-op store. They had some say in it. They had the members' meetings.
	I remember in the post-war period going to the City Hall in Newcastle, which held 2,000 people. You could not get in, because of the members of the Newcastle Society wanting to participate. Mind, I tell you, the two big issues that always drew the biggest crowd were when we sacked the general manager or when we reduced the dividend. Sometimes, when we did both, we knew that there was going to be an overflow. Those were the days of very large meetings.
	When I talked to my mam at a certain time in my life, I said, "How did you enjoy what I call social intercourse?". She said to me that there were two afternoons a week when she got out of the house. Dad was on the dole and she had five kids; I was the eldest. She went to meetings of the Women's Co-operative Guild and to the Labour Women's Section. "What did you do, Mam?" "Well", she said, "I listened to a speaker and we sang songs". "What did they speak about?". "Oh, I can't remember what they said, but I got out of the house for two hours"—social intercourse. It seems to me—and I do not blame anyone for this—that over the past 60 or 70 years the fabric of our society, or my society as I knew it, has been weakened. The Government are trying—and I pay due tribute to them—rather than making promises, to lift the democratic control that we ought to spend time and money on. I know the Minister, if she were able to be frank, would say that there were many more issues in her department which could command both time and money, so the Government should be congratulated on taking ownership of this issue.
	Now we come to the question of how to measure success. Is it an increase in numbers? Is it an increase in branches? Is it speeches—inches in the newspaper? It is very difficult indeed. My noble friend Lord Clarke of Hampstead drew my attention to two documents. One is entitled Burnley Speaks, Who Listens...?.He was the chairman of a taskforce report which dealt with the very sad events in Burnley in the early 1980s. I know from our conversations that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, read that. Arising from the work that was done then, we now have a body called Elevate. I know the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, will know all about that as well. Quite frankly I was very impressed when I went through Elevate to see what that taskforce was doing. I was very struck by the words of David Taylor, the chairman of Elevate. Besides telling us about his work, he says:
	"I have a theory that if you go right up to the top of the valley where you can see the terraces running up the hills, where they stop is almost like the high tide of the industrial revolution. As the tide ebbed away the problems set in. That's a measure of the challenge that we've got but people are always worth it. They really deserve more out of life. You transform buildings because that's what you can spend money on, but it's transforming lives that is the real challenge".
	If everyone who has participated today were to ask, "What have I got out of it?", it would be very difficult to be precise. There is a warm feeling of friendship—I call it comradeship—among people over the years. I think the Government have got this priority right. What is required? Funding, strategies, consultation, relevance, leadership—none of which is easy but all of which have to be tackled. The Government can be congratulated there.
	Again I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for having this debate and not forcing me but inviting me to read this report. I looked through the illustrations. There are case studies, which may be the best or may be run of the mill, but reference is given to Perry Common in north Birmingham, Portsmouth City Council, Hattersley Neighbourhood Partnership, Sandwell Town Teams, Rochdale junior neighbourhood wardens, Shoreditch Trust, Forums Against Extremism and Islamophobia, the Bradford Vision budget, petitions in Barking and Dagenham, and Gambesby village hall in Cumbria. They should go on record in this debate as being noted by parliamentarians and ought to be congratulated.
	In my youth, I joined dad's army. Before I saw service in the Royal Marines, I was a member of the Home Guard, the Local Defence Volunteers—quickly known as "look, duck and vanish". We do not create that sort of thing now. I do not want to use the term "going back to the good old days" or hanker after conditions as they were, but somehow society has to get its act together.
	I am glad that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely will make his maiden speech today, because, twice in the past three years, I went to christenings in Welwyn parish church, Hertfordshire. As well as babies Leo and Toby, 300 people squashed into the church on a Sunday morning. I am not a churchgoer, but I love going to a church when I get the opportunity. The Welwyn church is 1,000 years old and the congregation were happy and joyous to be brought together for a purpose.
	Two of the happiest times of my life were in 1977 and 1981. "What happened then?", I hear noble Lords cry—although not very loudly. The Silver Jubilee was in 1977 and the marriage of Charles and Diana was in 1981. In 1977, I said to my constituents, "I want to come to all the street parties", and I was invited to 82 on the same day. I had a good agent, who, with his wife, my wife and I, divided the parties up. The people were happy—not delirious, except when it got very late—and they enjoyed themselves. The British people are very good at responding to causes.
	The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred to agitation and argument. In Enfield, there is a proposition to close the A&E unit of Chase Farm Hospital and I have taken part in marches against this. On the right issue, there will be a response of that kind from people. These opportunities are given to us and the Government are carefully studying them. In the Elevate report and the report that we are debating, there is no question of looking for a quick fix. It will not come. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, nods his head because his experience is the same as mine. You have to be in this for the long haul. It is not an issue that will win medals or decorations; it has to give you satisfaction.
	I ask the Minister and her colleagues to continue doing these things. When I look at the changes during my life between what I knew and now, there is no comparison. Today, the population shops by car. When I think of the size of the corner shops and the Co-ops that I used to know and today's supermarkets, it is a different world. I enjoy the new world and I do not say anything against it, but we must understand that the problems that the Government and communities are facing are very real and earnest. So, my tuppenceworth to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is that I am very grateful that the repertory company has been assembled and we will continue to perform as well as we can until the next time.

The Lord Bishop of Ely: My Lords, I am very honoured to make a contribution to this debate. I am told that your Lordships' House is a place of welcome and hospitality, and I have found it so. I come from a rural and a farming background. I am proud to say that my family, despite all the things that have happened in the past few years, are still farming. All my ministry has been spent in small country parishes and I bring that experience to this House. In addition, I have spent 15 years at the National Agricultural Centre and with the Royal Agricultural Society dealing in a sense with the socio-economic issues that underline the report. The diocese I now serve comprises Cambridgeshire and west Norfolk. Ely looks out on some of the most fertile and consequently the most expensive land in England. A third of it is below sea level; part of the diocese is at 25 feet below sea level, so there are issues there that the House could address at some stage.
	Like the previous speaker, I welcome the report, not least for the range of issues that it raises—localism and the devolution of responsibility to local people is of the greatest importance. The concerns of rural areas were once much higher on the agenda than they are today. It is now almost forgotten that the post-war Mansholt plan of 1947, the foundation document of the common agricultural policy, was conceived of by virtually all the contributors as a social document. It said a lot about agriculture, but it was basically a social document and the countries that read it that way—France and Germany particularly—have therefore made great progress in those areas.
	Those who live in rural areas suffer from being on the margins. In recent years that has been exacerbated by planning policies and social policies based on the concept of city regions, which is an American concept, and central place theory. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentions community. "Community" is a central word but it is difficult to define. It can apply equally to the European Community and to a small religious house. A former academic colleague listed 94 definitions of community—that was of undoubted academic interest but not of a great deal of practical help as we looked at the problems of rural areas. In reality, community is known by its absence—we know when it is not present, but it is difficult to define by its presence.
	Endless government and other documents have spoken about the ideal size of rural settlements. I like the definition of a Fenland parishioner in the area that I now serve. She said that such a settlement has to be large enough for a good deal to be going on and small enough so that she misses none of it. The whole of the eastern region is experiencing extraordinary population growth, the fastest of any part of the country. Cambridgeshire is a region that is growing enormously and many people are responding to the challenges that that throws up.
	It is constantly brought home to those of us who live there that while it is easy to build houses, creating community is significantly more difficult, so much so that people are leaving the new settlements—Cambourne and so on—around Cambridge at a much faster rate than had been anticipated, and there is a danger of them acquiring a reputation for simply being acres of housing with no meaningful community. Whether good or bad local government happens in that area, that is not in a sense the point. The point is the indefinable sense of community in those places, which does not depend on the frequency of rubbish collections or the availability of children's playgrounds. Once again we can be trapped into believing that what we cannot measure does not exist.
	In rural areas few would deny the importance of voluntary organisations, and I pay tribute to all those who support them—the large army of volunteers themselves and those who argue their case in central and local government. I speak with personal experience as I served as a commissioner on the Rural Development Commission for 10 years until it ended in 1999. The Commission for Rural Communities—the new body that has taken over its work—together with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Arthur Rank Centre at Stoneleigh have all recently published papers which point to the significance of churches and faith communities in the development of what is now called social capital, but we would understand as local community. In this we recognise the way in which communities are created and sustained, and the clergy find that they recognise their roles and functions, the work of their buildings and of their congregations in the new and unfamiliar terminology of social capital, anchor organisations and so on.
	I welcome this report and the good things that no doubt will flow from it. I hope that the single reference to rural communities in the 12 examples that have been given in the report does not indicate a disposition to ignore that part of the country, where 20 per cent of the population live. I hope that the role of voluntary organisations in urban and rural areas will be deeply understood, well resourced and widely recognised.

Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, the right reverend Prelate mentioned the welcome that all new Peers receive in this House. The happy task of giving the formal welcome now falls to me. It is a pity that the House is a little thin, although the right reverend Prelate will come to recognise that that happens on a Thursday afternoon. It is a shame that more of our colleagues were not here to listen to his maiden speech. However, they will get the opportunity to hear him speak in the future.
	I knew that the right reverend Prelate must be a good egg when he chose to make his maiden speech in this debate. I knew no more about him than that until I discovered when I arrived here just before we started that I was to follow him. I see that his background before theology was in anthropology. I can tell him that that will come in handy here. His CV lists his non-political career. I have to say that I think that the Church of England manages a fair bit of politics. It is not, as my noble friend said, all tea on the vicarage lawn, so that will be great experience.
	I have always thought that those on the Bishops' Benches start with something of an advantage in two ways. I cannot say that I detected it in this case, but making a maiden speech might not feel like an easy thing to do. However, most of us arrive with no experience at all of speaking in rather august surroundings, sometimes to a few people and sometimes to a great many. I have always rather envied the Bishops their experience. Also, more seriously, they have a deep understanding of people's lives, which can sometimes be missed in the speed of life in London and in Parliament. However much we disparage the ivory tower and say that we get out of it, it can be a problem. In his speech today, the right reverend Prelate has clearly demonstrated what he and his colleagues bring to us in that regard, so I am very happy to welcome him on behalf of the House.
	My noble friend Lord Greaves said that his credentials include experience in the youth and student movement of our party. He did not share with the House the fact that he was asked by Jeremy Thorpe to get involved with and to keep an eye on that radical firebrand Graham Tope. They have both done a great deal in their communities to bring forward the issues that we are debating today. "Doing community engagement" are the words of the action plan, and I share with my noble friend a wish to use not just plain English, but good English. What probably most divides those of us on these Benches from noble Lords in the other two parties is what we see as legitimising a local authority and a local authority's government. They see it as giving power from central government to a local authority; we understand the formal legislative position, but for us the underlying philosophy is that the power comes from the people within the local authority area as a part of the governance arrangements as well as being its citizens. The language, as I and my noble friend have said, is important.
	Pictures are important, too. Whoever chose the picture accompanying the Secretary of State's foreword to this document had a sense of mischief. I am not sure whether the Secretary of State is heading a football or is about to be knocked out by it. I see from the Minister's face that she thinks that a little more proofreading in its widest sense might not go amiss sometimes. Still on the theme of language, I had thought that the term "citizen" featured nowhere in this paper. However, just before I came to Westminster, I found it in a paragraph about activists.
	Whatever the language, it has a hollow ring if it is only words. Local government throughout the country needs to be seen as powerful and local authorities need to be seen as autonomous; if they are not, everything else about empowerment is, at best, on a very insecure base. I am talking about things such as local income tax, ring-fenced grants and so on. Local authorities need to send out the unspoken message that they are open to ideas, to discussion and to involvement. Without this, there is a degree of cynicism that is difficult to overcome. That is not to be taken in any way as opposing the role of the community. I agree with other noble Lords that there is what one might sum up as a question mark over what is meant by community. I particularly liked the notion that one sometimes knows it by its absence. A structure without firm foundations will be very flimsy.
	Perhaps I am too naive. I start by assuming that all local authorities are doing the right thing and that they have that inclusiveness. Well, I know I am naive. I was shocked to learn from the document that in only 28 per cent of local authorities are petitions given an automatic response—whatever "automatic" means. I find that almost unbelievable. So perhaps processes and structures are needed. But I find the whole agenda, as put forward by the Government, too process-driven. The quicker we move from prescribed, discrete procedures to a culture where individuals who are elected—or who, as officers, are appointed—quite naturally involve local people, the better.
	I know that making the cultural shift is not always easy. It is now almost 10 years since I was an elected councillor, and local government has changed enormously in that time. But there are still some common principles. In 1983, when my group took over the administration of my local authority, I became chair of the planning committee. We changed the procedures almost overnight to involve those who were affected by planning applications as well as those involved in the whole area of forward planning. I did not at the time recognise how difficult I was making life for the officers by imposing these new ideas on them. Perhaps it is unfair to say "imposing"—they did not resist them. But it was a real difficulty for them to be thrown, with no experience or training, into what they perceived as very difficult environments, in meetings that went from being 20 minutes in private to being four or five hours in public, facing local people. For some people, a big cultural shift needs to be made.
	Involving local people well is time consuming. Unless you provide feedback—I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for using a word that he will hate as much as I do—and unless it is an iterative process, it is not good enough. Moreover, none of this comes cheap, if we are to do it well.
	Perhaps almost the hardest thing is to get to the point where those involved have a shared understanding of the problems that they are seeking to solve. Some of that is about language. Recently, having received a letter about a consultation about a controlled parking zone—in suburban London, that is about as contentious as you can get—I noted that my neighbour's response was about something different; he wanted to raise the configuration of the road. He was not wrong, but that is not the focus of the consultation and it is irrelevant to that issue, so he will be disappointed. People are not starting from a common base.
	The mechanisms for communication are changing. This morning, I was at a meeting with the London boroughs and the London Civic Forum discussing the proposed budget of the Mayor of London for next year. The chair of the civic forum reminded us that printed communication is on its way to being obsolete and that new media, "used by citizens other than geeks like us"—I quote him—are what one needs to focus on. The website www.theyworkforyou.com facilitates communication, which comes to us as a "letter from your constituent". I do not know whether this will get me a mention on the website. It has a lot of information and very good links. The e-mails that I get as a Member of the London Assembly, which is London's strategic government and which has a rather particular role, are almost invariably about things over which the GLA has little influence, let alone direct power. People who are using the facility express their frustration and I feel embarrassed that the answers often have to go back, as nicely and helpfully as possible, saying, "This is not something for us". The bureaucracy and the demarcations must make citizens' eyes glaze over. Until you get a common foundation of understanding about how our governance works, a lot of frustration will be caused.
	Communication, as ever, is the best foundation for involvement and access. Another item that came up this morning was how well in many parts of London safer neighbourhoods policing, which is very local policing, is working, because people know whom to contact and they can see what is going on.
	The document recognises the dangers of raising expectations. At this point, I will mention another document, the consultation on petitions, which the Government have just published. I fear that the danger of raised expectations does not seem to be acknowledged. I find what is proposed in that document, which I know comes from the Act that the repertory company recently worked its way through, rather disingenuous and rigid. It provides something of a gift to opposition parties on local authorities. Many of us will know how easy it is to get signatures to petitions.
	Empowerment is a big subject. I have not mentioned community leadership or distinguishing devolution from subsidiarity. We could talk about all sorts of areas of community activity, such as sports and the arts, which would take us on to funding. Perhaps one should ask the repertory company mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Graham, whether this is high drama, tragedy, or farce. One of the actions in the action plan is to open up direct dialogue with local activists. Action 15 states:
	"We need local community activists to work with us to tell us what is really happening and influence our thinking about policies".
	I should like to recommend some community activists—elected councillors. From what we have heard, the councillors in Pendle are well qualified.

Lord Dixon-Smith: My Lords, I have one interest to declare. Oh, I beg the noble Baroness's pardon.

Baroness Scott of Needham Market: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Greaves for initiating this debate today. Tony Greaves, as most of us refer to him in our party, was one of the authors of community politics in the 1960s and beyond. He literally wrote the book regarding most of the campaigning techniques that political parties and other groups use today. They may have become more sophisticated, but the fundamentals were developed by Tony and his colleagues. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude for what he has done.
	I am also very pleased to have been here for the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. The House will be very grateful not just for his comments today but for his rural perspective in future debates. I come from the neighbouring county of Suffolk and I know how difficult it is for rural communities to feel that politicians operating from London really understand their concerns. It seems ironic, incidentally, that a debate on involvement has attracted so few speakers. I found myself asking why this is. I came to the conclusion that the problem is that we are debating a document called The Action Plan for Community Empowerment. I am afraid to say to the Government that the term "action plan" has now become oxymoronic. It usually means that someone has gone away and thought about things and that nothing will be done. Community empowerment is seen by most people as meaningless jargon.
	The fact that there are so few speakers in this debate demonstrates that the language we use is absolutely key if people are to get involved. If Members of your Lordship's House cannot take an interest in such a debate, we really have our work cut out to expect people outside to engage in a debate that is couched in these sorts of terms. It emphasises what is seen as the divide in thinking between Whitehall and Westminster and the rest of world where we are seen as living in an ivory tower. That is something of a shame because every one of us here is a member of a number of communities. Everyone in the country belongs to a number of communities: where they happen to live, the places where they work, where they worship, or among people who share their interests.
	What differentiates each one of us is the strength of those ties, how much importance we each place on them, and how much time, effort and energy we are each prepared to put into that sense of community. That is where the comments of my noble friend Lord Greaves comments were absolutely right. It is not possible to legislate for that. It is not possible somehow to direct from above or even from a local authority that people must get involved in a particular way. This is something that people will choose to do if they think it is worth while. The question today is how government, central and local, and public bodies should behave and organise themselves in order to encourage the sense of community which already exists and further to encourage the development of community thinking and action where it does not.
	The right reverend Prelate made a very interesting point when he said that community was often more noticeable in its absence. When I moved to Needham Market in the early 1980s, having spent my life moving around as a forces child and then as a forces wife, I certainly found that the sense of community just hit me because it was something I had never come across before. I found it hugely comforting. Becoming involved in community activities was what led me into politics. So there is a salutary lesson there for anyone. Nevertheless, I think you know community when you see it. It is what makes this sort of debate so difficult. I have a certain amount of sympathy with the Government when they are trying to produce documents such as this, because it is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I recognise the difficulty but they, in turn, must recognise that there is a danger that in trying to pin too much down, you lose the sense of the very thing you are trying to create.
	It is a fact of modern life that we are much less geographically rooted than we were. Much is made of how this country has one of the most flexible job markets in the world. That tends to mean that people move around and are therefore much less rooted. It is much harder to have a sense of community if you think you will be living somewhere for only two or three years and will then move on. The Government will have to think hard about that when it comes to providing new housing. As the right reverend Prelate so rightly said, we can build the houses but we cannot easily build the communities.
	The noble Lord, Lord Graham, made some interesting points—with some of which I agreed—about how much has changed in recent years in the way in which people become involved. A whole industry has developed around the consumerist approach that links service users and their providers, using things such as surveys, feedback and complaint forms. This is relatively recent. There are much better networks now, much better ways in which interest groups organise themselves and have their say. That applies both locally and nationally. When I get a heavy postbag on a particular issue—at the moment it is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill—I think it is fantastic that people take the time and trouble to put pen to paper or send an e-mail.
	We have seen huge growth in what I think of as the participatory events. In addition to turning up to public meetings, people are involved in citizens' juries and community workshops. A lot of exciting work is going on, and that is very new too. There are also the events that react to specific challenges. My noble friend Lord Greaves and the noble Lord, Lord Graham, talked about how people will come out of the woodwork when something really affects them, such as post office or hospital closures. But the act of voting is still the biggest way in which people are involved in their local community. Despite declining voter turn-out, more people turn out to vote than are involved in other areas. We should never forget that or denigrate the role of local elections.
	There needs to be a balance of all the methods I have described. The ballot box is not always perfect. We on these Benches argue that there is a difficulty when first-past-the-post electoral systems result in fiefdoms, which can result in unresponsive government. The public have reacted by electing far more local authorities which are now in no overall political control, but the Government are making it quite difficult to manage those politically. I do not intend to rerun the debates we had on the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill but there is a danger that the current models imposed on local authorities deny the plurality that the voters have chosen. If they want a council run by a number of political groups, it is the business of Government not to get in the way of the councils running themselves. I genuinely believe that local democracy works best when it is truly local. Evidence from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, among others, has shown that relationships are closer between smaller organisations and communities. The larger organisations become, the harder it is to keep that closeness.
	I recognise that there is a difficult balance to be struck as regards obtaining efficiency, economies of scale and capacity for a strategic role. All those tend to gravitate towards larger units, not just for local authorities but for all sorts of other public bodies. Yet we know that the public would rather have a council that is close by, where they feel that they know the people involved, and where they can go to the town hall rather than have a huge modern, PFI-built structure on the edge of town that nobody can get to. Telling them that they can send an e-mail is still not the way to involve many people. We need to do an awful lot more to develop situations that work in particular areas where smaller councils can work together to provide strategic services but still be small enough to keep the local link. At the same time large councils can be helped to develop governance mechanisms that keep them close to the people they represent. The concept that these solutions should be developed locally is key.
	As I said, this is not just a local authority problem. I often hear how consolidation in the housing association sector means that housing associations, which are becoming ever larger, are losing much of the local link with the residents that was a key part in the decision to move to a housing association in the first place. It is a great pity if tenants feel that they are losing that involvement.
	It seems to me that what is absolutely key, regardless of which method of participation or involvement brings people in, is genuine accountability. People want to know to whom they should be talking, whether anybody will listen and, most importantly, whether anything will get done as a result. There is much evidence to show that there is virtually a systemic failure to bring the results of complaints and consultation exercises into decision-making. That has led to real cynicism about local governance. People will not get involved if they think that it will not make any difference. That has been exacerbated by the huge number of local bodies which now operate. Most areas have a real alphabet soup of public bodies providing services, giving grants and performing other functions. All that makes it very difficult for citizens to work their way through the system.
	I know that the Government have rather belatedly recognised that and by forming local strategic partnerships are making an attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. However, there are dangers in that. There is a danger of having too much closed door decision-making. There may be more people behind the closed door but it may still be a closed door. Taxpayers' money is involved here. If we are to ensure that people do not become cynical where taxpayers' money is being spent, they need to be able to see what is happening. I have seen two reports recently from local press organisations, which say they believe that under new executive arrangements local councils are much less transparent than they used to be. The press feel that they are not able to do the job they used to do in reporting to the citizens in their areas.
	It seems to us that council leadership is absolutely essential because when it comes to the crunch they are the only people who can be booted out. They are the only people who can be held accountable by the local population. There is a major challenge as regards how we ensure that these networks are genuinely open to everyone. We have to accept that many people will choose never to get involved. Rowntree estimates that about 50 per cent of the population in a given area are not involved and do not want to be, and we have to accept that. However, that still leaves a lot of scope for work. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee, said, the methods we use to consult, the location and design of buildings, and whether people are contactable by e-mail are not rocket science but they are very important in terms of whether people feel there is a point in getting involved.
	But ultimately the key to this is that central government have to deal with the paradox that on the one hand they seek to maintain central control, particularly financial, but at the same time they put duties on local authorities to consult residents and users. If community involvement is to be genuine, local bodies must have genuine autonomy. They need to be free from targets, ring-fenced grants, inspections, public service agreements, capping and the whole centralist paraphernalia. Until they are genuinely autonomous and can respond to the communities, Government face an uphill struggle.

Lord Dixon-Smith: My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, for my premature jump; it was quite inadvertent. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for introducing this interesting debate on community empowerment and local democratic structures. There is absolutely nothing new about this. All that has changed is the terminology and the way in which it is undertaken.
	I, too, welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. I am a fellow East Anglian, born, bred and raised in East Anglia. As he is from Ely, he may think that Essex is not a part of East Anglia—it is a rather urban type of existence there—but I assure him that I have a great deal in common with him in what he was saying. I thought his comments on the need to develop community in relation to new developments, particularly large-scale ones, were interesting and helpful.
	All of us who have been involved in this for a long time—I cannot begin to approach the depth of experience of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton—have different perspectives on the subject. Perhaps I might be allowed a couple of reminiscences to show how hot community involvement can be. I well remember an occasion when we were consulting on education reorganisation, which, curiously enough, was required by Harold Wilson's Government back in the late 1960s. We, a Conservative education authority, proposed to a district in a Labour authority a very Labour form of reorganisation. It was a new town where the population had stopped growing. All of a sudden, the school populations began to drop and something had to be done, but we did not like the idea of closing schools. I shall not bore the House with the detail, but we held a series of meetings in the town. One night, six of us went to chair the meetings and about 400 or 500 people attended each one. That is real community involvement. People felt passionate about the issue, which was exacerbated for political reasons. Another point you need to bear in mind on community involvement is whom you are talking to. In that instance, we were Conservatives and they were socialists, but they would have fought us whatever we proposed. That is the way life is sometimes.
	Another example of real empowerment arose in a different town, where there was a similar series of meetings. The one that I chaired was going extremely well. There were about 600 people in the school sports hall on a bitterly cold night. The meeting could have gone on all night, but after an hour and a half the school caretaker, a very wise man, simply turned off the heating. That is real empowerment. The meeting came to a sensible conclusion and closed at a reasonable hour. That is community involvement.
	We should recognise that this has gone on over a long time. Of course, its nature has changed, but to have community involvement you need an issue. The idea that people will keep coming out to chew the fat over minor changes in their community on a monthly or even a quarterly basis is just unreal. They simply will not. There are too many other distractions in life nowadays.
	I am afraid that my view is that community interest has diminished. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, talked about community leadership and accountability. Not least of the difficulties that we have in dealing with this subject relates to the fact that when I began local authorities held virtually absolute power. It did not matter whether it was a county, district or parish council; their powers were defined. They had an annual budget that was in their absolute control and the result was that, when a particular issue arose, the community knew precisely whom to go to and who was responsible.
	I talked to my local county council before this debate, which said that it is now subject to approximately 200 separate targets or standards set by central government or often arising from European initiatives, especially on the environment. Councils must follow set rules. Then there is the financial aspect. Because of the changes in local finance arrangements over the years, the vast proportion of the money comes from central government, which has a dramatic effect on how rates move. A shift in local government resources up or down is greatly multiplied at the ratepayer level. That is the reality of life and it diminishes the authority of members of the councils in the eyes of the public. There is no longer the clarity of responsibility that used to exist.
	I accept that it is necessary to have clearly defined standards on the environment, but the micromanagement of the economy of local authorities has not helped their standing, although they can take decisions that matter—I pay tribute to those who take on that responsibility—and they do an extremely good job in increasingly difficult circumstances. We need to recognise the enormous contribution that local authorities make to British society, which benefits hugely from the voluntary sector—in this sense, local government is a voluntary sector—where people do everything they possibly can, generally successfully, to make the system work effectively in the interests of their community. I pay serious tribute to the people who do that.
	I do not think that there will ever be an ideal situation—a sort of Utopia or community where everybody feels properly involved in everything. Society moves on. We are having a good debate this afternoon, but if I may be allowed to say it—this is not meant to be an acid comment, as I am one of them—we are a group of relatively aged people. I suspect that if we talked to the young they would think that we were having a wonderful waffle about something that does not really matter. If we want to communicate with them, we probably need to do it on the internet, which leads us into the business of community petitions and so on, in which some people will get interested.
	Young people may listen to this discussion on community and all the rest of it, but unless a particular issue catches their imagination or interest they will not get involved; they have other interests. One of the issues with which we should concern ourselves relates to—I will not say the alienation of the younger generation, because that implies antagonism—the fact that, in my experience, younger generations are reluctant to get involved in public life in the way that was quite usual when I started.
	When I started, the average age of council members came down by some months because of my intervention, but coming to the council with me were a number of young people of similar age. Now when I look at my local authority, young people are a rarity, as they are in voluntary work. That is immensely sad. I do not know what we are going to do about that. It is an issue that has nothing to do with politics and something to do with the way we lead our lives.
	The uncertainty introduced by increasing central government intervention in local government has made matters worse. Another aspect that still causes me some concern, inevitably, is that for 40 years there has been no sense of constitutional stability for local government to rely on. Forty years covers a great many Governments of different political persuasions, so this is not a party-political issue. The structure of local government has not been stable for that length of time and is still not stable. There are still rumbles around the country over whether you should have this sort of organisation or that sort of organisation and so on. Everybody feels this uncertainty. We have a regional structure that was first to be made democratic and now is not to be. The regional assemblies are to go altogether and we will have regional development agencies. They, of course, have taken some authority away from county councils and, to some degree, unitary authorities. We are still in a state of flux.
	If I have a final message, it is that my contacts across the spectrum of local government all say, "Please, if we could just leave things alone for a few years, we might be able to make them work". That will be real community government, because people will know where they stand. You cannot expect good communities— I go back to the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely—to come together and work together in a really effective way without some degree of stability. That is a particular problem when we are developing new communities and we have to face it. People need stability if they are to be able to work together.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for giving us the opportunity to debate a very important topic. There is no one in this House who could have opened this debate or steered it implicitly like the noble Lord, for all the reasons colleagues on his Benches have made clear. The noble Lord has written a book; we are still leafing through the index to some extent. I am grateful for the breadth of his introduction because we have had a very thoughtful debate, as much about the context in which we conduct community policies as the policies themselves.
	It is a very useful and welcome opportunity for me to talk about what the Government are doing. Before I do so, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely on his maiden speech. We are a small but very distinguished group in the Chamber this afternoon. The right reverend Prelate, having chosen to join us, has added lustre to the company. It was extremely significant that he spoke from his experience as somebody who knows—and, indeed, has written widely about—the rural community. I hope I can give him every assurance that the rural community is important to everything we say in the document and our policies. How could it be otherwise? The right reverend Prelate has worked to address isolation and bring people in from the margins, as he described it, through his position as chair of the Cambridgeshire branch of Action with Communities in Rural England. There is some excellent social enterprise work being done by the Ferry Project in Wisbech and the Huntingdonshire Youth Bank, which puts money directly into the hands of young people for them to decide how to spend it. That is the sort of example which might reassure the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, about young people's involvement in a range of voluntary organisations and their willingness to take responsibility and power.
	I am grateful for the support I detected for the action plan. I hope to prove that it is both a plan and full of action which will be taken. I very much agree with much of what has been said this afternoon. Noble Lords are absolutely right in their critique of language; the language in this field is very difficult indeed. I agree that "community empowerment" is a clumsy term. I wish there was something that we could all agree on which would mean everything that we would want it to mean. It is difficult to find a word that does that. We talk about community involvement and influence. Wherever possible, we should always use the simplest and most direct and common language. We really must address this, and I promise to do so. It is quite a well known term but we will go on looking for words which mean "enabling the people to become involved and influence the services and places they live in the best possible way". That is ultimately what we are talking about.
	Making this connection with the wider community will be a defining mark of this Government, making going beyond the town hall a clear priority and making practical propositions. That is one of the things that make it different and new. We are looking at a set of practical propositions in our action plan. I would not say that they are processes; they are new tools. Some are not that new, because they have been used and developed by the best councils, but bringing them together in a strategy plan is new.
	We have heard different versions of the personal journeys that noble Lords have made this afternoon, including, I am pleased to say, from my noble friend Lord Graham. They have been reflected by the Government's journey because things have changed from the days of mass protests, when getting involved meant going to a meeting. It is not like that any more and we must recognise and address that. Since 2000, we have been engaged on a genuine journey of devolution which started with Scotland and Wales and ended up before Christmas, via the local government White Paper and the Governance of Britain Green Paper, with a concordat between central and local government which consolidated that relationship. It was very seriously negotiated and not something where it was said "Let's do that because it'll look good" at all. It said, for the first time, that local and central government have a responsibility to use tax payers' money well, devolve power and engage and empower communities and individual citizens at local and national levels in debate, decision making, and shaping and delivering services. That is quite simple language.
	Behind and underneath all that is a set of problems which community engagement is designed to help us solve. Among them are the self-evident problems that noble Lords have addressed today in many different ways: the challenge of building trust and coherence in a complex, diverse and fragmented society, and in rural communities where isolation is often visible and yet invisible when one thinks about young people, for example. People who engage and are active in their communities build up what we call "social capital", enabling them to build communities, connect, and do and change things together.
	Secondly, there is the challenge of the democratic deficit. There is low participation in all forms of elections. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, talked about the ageing of the councillors; the average is 58.3 years, and only 3.5 per cent of councillors are under 30. One of the paradoxes is that there is no shortage of interest in how local government spends its money or provides services. There is evidence to suggest that the action plan and its actions can be made successful because people want to be informed and involved. Some 71 per cent of non-voters said they were likely to get involved in a process where they decided how and where local money is spent, and 80 per cent of people agree that they would engage more if they had been aware of the opportunity to do so, and given help and advice. Yes, we have that hierarchy where 15 per cent are very active and 15 per cent do not know or want to be involved. Yet there is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said, great potential for bringing in the community bystanders, not giving them tasks but enabling them to discover what they can do to change their communities.
	This is about designing, managing and changing policies and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, moving towards a shared understanding of where the problems are and so where the solutions are. One positive thing that takes us away from this suggestion that people will get involved only when they want to change or stop something is our experience in New Deal for Communities or our neighbourhood management. Ordinary people with skills they did not even know they had took on the responsibility for changing their communities, and have done so. We have seen, in those deprived and difficult communities, progress in the improvement of school standards, in the reduction of crime and in the improvement of housing and the environment. This has changed people's perceptions about the places in which they live. That is positive community involvement.
	I am sure the right reverend Prelate was right when he said that we recognise community when it is not there, but people I see when going to these communities are also very clear about what is changing and what is good about where they live. That is what we want to be able to spread. I note the assertion of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, that nothing here is new. What is new about how we have approached this is that, first, involving people in helping find the solutions is now essential to what the Government are trying to do and the way they are trying to do it. I give all credit to the Secretary of State for making this a personal and political priority. It is certainly central to my department in the way we are trying to transform communities and the way we provide housing and new communities. The right reverend Prelate was right; of course we must not just build houses, and we do not intend to. It is a challenge to build communities where they do not exist and to change communities that do. Yet it is community planning—master-planning with the community resource and infrastructure at its heart—that will help us get from the beginning a sense of what the community wants. That is what we are trying to do.
	The second difference is that it is about direct levers. I will come on to illustrate that with a few examples. Thirdly, it is different because it is about the whole of Government. This is not something that the department which is called "Communities" has to deal with alone. We have to move this out across Whitehall. For example, in the youth action plan, the emphasis is put on young people making changes and giving them money as well as power to determine the sorts of facilities they want in their communities. There is the involvement of children in the children plan. The LINKs network in health is another radical change, going beyond the usual suspects to determine what is best in terms of social care. There is a sea change in the way the Government are drawing on these resources—because that is what they are.
	The action plan is ambitious; it is a major plan. It starts with the need for cultural change, the duty to involve a radical step which requires local authorities to show that they have involved the community. We recently published draft statutory guidance on both that and local strategic partnerships, and community strategies in relation to that. We are now looking for the best ways of doing that. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, referred to the 200 targets that are involved in many local authorities' decisions at the moment. There used to be 1,200 targets and we have made a quite significant change there. We will be consulting on draft regulations soon and guidance on the duty in the Sustainable Communities Act. But we in the department are also wrestling with the problem of the particular form of communities. I absolutely take the point that there are many different definitions of community, as there are many different types of communities—whether ethnic communities, communities of interest, or whatever.
	We are dealing with problems of community cohesion: the need to find ways to promote the sort of social engagement that enables the building of trust in communities which are very diverse. Our Connecting Communities fund is making that a reality by supporting the work of minority ethnic groups through community networks; for example, helping them to run citizens' days so that they get to know each other.
	On housing and planning, two Bills are coming forward from another place very shortly. The Housing Bill will give tenants and residents more power to shape their lives and their housing conditions. The Planning Bill, contrary to popular mythology, is creating more opportunity at three different stages of the planning process to involve people in what is happening in their communities. That is about creating different cultures and opening doors.
	We are also looking at widening and deepening opportunities locally. I have two examples. I know that asset transfer is close to the heart of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, thereby creating opportunities for communities to manage and own local public buildings, village halls and community centres so that we have much more accessible community resources. Those are resources from which skills, opportunities and even jobs can be grown. Those are social enterprises. It is not only in instances such as Coin Street in London. In rural areas, we have Gamblesby in Cumbria, where the village hall has given the whole community a new focal point and a sense of purpose.
	If we move from that to participatory budgeting, we are looking at instances such as Bradford, where £1 million has been spent in five years: local people deciding how to spend money on local issues. That is why we announced 10 pilot areas in July and a further 12 last month, because we are ambitious for every local authority in the country to offer that within five years. I can say to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, that those are not just words; this is real difference. It will work and it will happen, because people want it.
	We talked also about the need to improve services. You can do that in two ways—we have chosen two. Through local charters, which are more strategic, we want councils to work more visibly with the community as a whole. On the question raised by the noble Lord about what constitutes a community in that sense, it can be a community organisation or an alliance of community organisations. That will be determined locally. We are issuing guidance across the country in March for local authorities wanting to develop charters. Then there are petitions. I heard what the noble Baroness said, but she will know that we are building on the Councillors' Commission. I am sure that the consultative process will throw up many ideas and comments on that. We will publish responses on both those issues later this year, and we will draft legislation if necessary.
	All that will change, strengthen and galvanise local democracy, which is what it is intended to do. We also need to tackle the malaise in local government: the failures represented by ageing structures and the unattractiveness of a proposition that used to be so much connected with civic pride. That is where the Roberts commission has fitted in. We are now looking in detail at its recommendations, which are many and various, and will respond to it. What it says about local government is also being reflected in the work being done by the Darzi commission and the Flanagan review of the police force. How do we bring in more people, how do we get them to take responsibility for the things that really affect and harm their lives?
	We cannot do any of that unless we provide support mechanisms. I have a bit of jargon here. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentioned the network of empowering authorities, which is what it is. It is a core of 18 local authorities which will be the trailblazers for good practice. They will work together to spread the message: this is how things can change and work. We need those people to help us do that. They will not listen to us, but they will listen to local authorities who have done it for themselves. Alongside that we will have a national partnership of all those bodies which bring together ideas—the IDeA, the LGA, the Urban Forum—giving serious purpose to what will actually enthuse, galvanise and mobilise people. We have community anchor organisations as well.
	My noble friend asked how you measure success. That is a very important question. Public Service Agreement No. 21 seeks to build more cohesive, active and empowered communities. We will not only be seeking to meet that target; we are also finding new ways of measuring participation, both active and passive. We are doing a citizenship survey, for example, to look at everything from school governorship to who and how many sign local petitions. Through the national census of local authority councillors, we will be measuring the profile of councillors. Noble Lords are also right to ask about resources. These are not simply words; they are not even simply good ideas. There will be investment in this—£35 million has been committed to underpin the action plan.
	Having gone through rather rapidly and superficially what is in this plan and what it signifies, I hope noble Lords agree that what is different is that there are new opportunities. There is a new seriousness, a new centrality of purpose. There are ways of enthusing people, young and old, in these programmes and of holding out a better future. There is connectivity between the range of things that local government can do and what the community wants to do for itself. We can open doors. It is uncomfortable but we have to face those realities. If we have the principles and some of the processes right, and the ambition, we can actually do it. As for making community a reality, to return to where the right reverend Prelate started, if we can recognise in five years' time a community by what it has rather than by what it has lost, we will be on the way to making genuine change.

Lord Greaves: My Lords, it occurred to me while I was listening to this excellent debate that I had forgotten to make a formal declaration of interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council. I think I have made it fairly clear what I do when I am not here but I need to put it on record formally.
	I was not wrong when I forecast that there would be quality in this debate to make up for the lack of quantity. I thank all those who have taken part, in particular the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. We all look forward to hearing what more he has to say over his years in this House.
	I will make two or three very quick points. The noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, made some extremely interesting points. One of them was about the rise of the BNP in some areas. It reminded me that, if my party will have me again and if I can find 10 people to nominate me, I may defend my council seat in May in a ward in which the BNP are in second place. In circumstances like that community activity is very political indeed. You simply cannot take the politics out of it.
	My noble friend Lady Hamwee talked about her experience in setting up a system in the planning committee when she was chairing it and members of the public and objectors and applicants were able to come and speak. I had the same experience. When we set up ours, we relied very much on the experience in Richmond. There is a huge amount of experience out there which has to be tapped into and used. We are not inventing the wheel and the Government are not inventing the wheel.
	Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Graham, talked about campaigning against hospital closures and said that he is still involved in them. That reminded me that last Friday I chaired an amazing meeting of activists and councillors from our party across six boroughs in East Lancashire to work on a campaign on hospitals there. We have set up a website, which will please the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, and all his young friends, called itsournhs.org.uk, which you can all go and have a look at. You will find I am there so perhaps you will not want to look at it.
	There is a whole spectrum of oppositional street activism, which goes right through to the huge privilege of being able to move Motions such as this in your Lordships' House. Not everyone will want to be involved in that spectrum, but there is somewhere for everyone. I was very impressed by the Minister's enthusiasm and sense of determination, and I shall read carefully what she has said. The consultation on this report, An Action Plan for Community Empowerment, runs to 19 January. One reason to have this debate was to contribute to that consultation. I should be very grateful if everything said today, reported in Hansard, is put into that consultation process.
	Finally, I came across a wonderful quote just 10 minutes before I came into the Chamber, but I was unable to find out who said it—no doubt someone will tell me in due course.
	"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves".
	I thought we should have a big banner saying that erected over the Peers Entrance, but then I thought Black Rod probably would not be too happy about that. Instead, all I can do is beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

China: Human Rights

Lord Alton of Liverpool: asked Her Majesty's Government what is their assessment of China's role in promoting and respecting human rights.
	My Lords, this short debate is taking place in advance of the United Kingdom and China human rights dialogue which will be held in Beijing at the end of this month; and, of course, in the year that China will host the Olympic Games, to be formally opened on 8 August. While welcoming the official dialogue, which commenced in 1997—eight years after the Tiananmen Square massacre—and which seeks to deepen an understanding of human rights issues on both sides, I want to ask the Government what benchmarks they use to assess the success of that approach, and whether they see this year as a unique opportunity to deepen an awareness of the centrality of human rights to China's relationship with the rest of the world, both in a domestic setting and in the conduct of its foreign policy.
	I also want to flag up a number of specific concerns, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who are to speak later and who will enlarge on these points and raise others. Let me begin with the use of the death penalty. It is estimated that each year some 8,000 executions take place in China. Last June, the state media suggested that there had been,
	"fewer executions after legal reforms".
	Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether we have been able to assess the veracity of that claim. For instance, are appeals against the death penalty being held in open court and have we made progress in calling for national data on the use of the death penalty to be collated and published?
	Disturbingly, the death penalty is used for 68 different offences in China, including non-violent crimes such as embezzlement and drugs-related offences. In July last, Zhang Ning, former chief accountant of the railway bureau in Lanzhou city, Gansu province, was sentenced to death after soliciting bribes and using public funds in failed investments. Later that month, Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of the State Food and Drug Administration, was executed after conviction for accepting bribes.
	Other aspects of the judicial system also give cause for concern. Detention without trial and the use of "re-education through labour" is widely used. In the run-up to the Olympics, it is reported that the Beijing city authorities have used a "strike hard" campaign of detention to crack down on groups such as beggars, vagrants and unlawful taxi drivers. "Re-education through labour" and the use of detention as a punishment without trial is a flagrant violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China has signed and has declared its intention to ratify.
	I hope that the Government will tell us what progress is being made on ratification and on other outstanding undertakings, such as implementation of the United Nations convention against torture and on issues such as freedom of expression.
	In 2001, the authorities declared that there would be complete media freedom for the Olympic Games; namely, that 30,000 foreign journalists will be able to report without restriction, which is welcome. But how does that compare with the treatment of China's own journalists? Amnesty says that one reporter, Lan Chengzhang, was beaten to death last year and journalists who then reported his case in the journal Democracy and Legal Times were dismissed. In July, the China Development Brief was banned.
	Meanwhile, internet censorship has intensified, with websites regularly closed down. It is estimated that there could be 187 million internet search users by the close of this year. What a tragedy that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all collaborated in the censoring of the web. Microsoft blocks words such as "freedom", "democracy" and "demonstration", while Yahoo deplorably decided to provide to the state information about Shi Tao, a journalist with Contemporary Business News in Hunan province. As a result he was jailed for 10 years after he released to foreign-based websites an internal Communist Party document, while a Google search for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement would direct users to a string of condemnatory articles. The BBC news site is inaccessible and broadcasts are jammed. At least 33 journalists and 50 internet users are currently detained in China.
	In June last, three editors from the Chengdu Evening News, in Sichuan province, were dismissed after unwittingly carrying a small advertisement by families asking for justice for those killed in Tiananmen Square. In the long term, trying to erect a great firewall and a great wall of the airwaves will not serve China's interests. Unsurprisingly, human rights activities fare no better than those of journalists. In July last, the death was reported of Chen Xiaoming, a Shanghai activist, who was reportedly stripped naked, physically abused, held at a secret location, denied family access, and when released was barely alive, dying one month later of a massive haemorrhage.
	I have regularly raised the case of Chen Guangchen, a blind self-taught lawyer, imprisoned in Shandong province in 2005 after he exposed the mass forced abortion and sterilisation of thousands of women in Shandong. China is the only country in the world where it is illegal to have a brother or a sister. Female foeticide has led to a population imbalance of 117 men to every 100 women, and that is leading to catastrophic social consequences.
	Human Rights Watch said of Chen's case:
	"It was house arrest, physical abuse, and then 'disappearance' ... His case is a textbook example of how little the rule of law really means in China".
	When Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, recently tried to travel to the Philippines to receive on her husband's behalf the Magsaysay Award—Asia's Nobel Prize—she was accosted by 17 men and forcibly returned to Shandong. I wonder what the Minister can tell us about Chen's current position. I hope that he will also tell the House what proportion of our continued financial support for the United Nations population fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation is channelled to the Chinese Population Association, the arm of the state responsible for those policies. In 2006-07 DfID gave £25 million to the UNFPA and £7.6 million to the IPPF.
	If political rights and human rights are infringed in China, so are religious liberties. In November I raised by way of Written Question the case of the Tibetan nomad, Rongye Adak, who was imprisoned after he called for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet. In commenting on his well-being, will the Minister say something about the status and whereabouts of the Panchen Lama and the new 14-part regulations issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs detailing the Government's prohibition on any reincarnated lama being identified without Beijing's approval? Tibetan religion is, of course, the root of Tibetan identity and that is why China wants to destroy it.
	Do the Government know whether any progress is being made in the talks between the Dalai Lama's representatives and the Chinese authorities? There are over 100 million self-described Buddhists in China. They have been shown little tolerance. Nor have the Uighur Muslims, the Falun Gong or Christians.
	The Institute on Religion and Public Policy—I serve in an unpaid capacity on its board of advisers—details the harvesting of organs of Falun Gong members, their incarceration in re-education camps, and the use of electro-shock therapy and torture to force adherents to recant their beliefs. Millions of underground Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have also faced persecution for their beliefs. An article in this week's Tablet says that up to a dozen Catholic bishops remain incarcerated—under house arrest, in police custody or in hiding. Forty of China's 100 Catholic dioceses have no bishop and the Holy See remains unrecognised. Thousands of member of the underground Catholic Church and members of various illegal Protestant house churches have been arrested and tortured while in detention.
	In particular I want to mention Bishop Lin Xili, imprisoned since 1999 and who is elderly and in bad health; Bishop Shi Enxiang, imprisoned since 2001; Bishop Xu Zemin, rearrested in 1997 and who has disappeared; and Bishop Yao Liang, arrested in 2005 and who is in his 80s. In addition, Tian Mingwei and Su Dean, two prominent Protestant leaders of one of China's largest house church networks, are currently being detained by local police in Jiuquan City, Gansu province, arrested on 20 December 2007. Christian Solidarity Worldwide said in a statement issued yesterday:
	"At the beginning of the year of the Beijing Olympics, their treatment highlights the lack of religious freedoms in China. Their arrest comes just two days after President Hu Jintao presented and reiterated a policy of religious freedom at a session of the politburo of the Communist Party focusing on religion. While such statements are welcomed, they must be weighed by the realities experienced on the ground by China's religious believers".
	We cannot and should not ignore such realities. As China flexes its economic muscle and enjoys unprecedented economic growth, there needs to be a commensurate change in the way it dispenses justice and deals with human rights. Change at home will influence its actions overseas and within the region—in its relations with Tibet and Taiwan, and in the way it deals with issues such as the repatriation of North Korean refugees. I particularly welcome its helpful role, and that of our own Government, in the recent case of Yoo Sang-joon, who was due to be repatriated to North Korea where he would have faced execution. Similarly, China could win widespread acclaim if it used its influence to put pressure on Burma to recognise and free Aung San Suu Kyi.
	Elsewhere in the world, China has begun to take more account of international opinion, as its foreign policy in North Korea and Sudan has revealed, and it could also exercise great influence in other parts of Africa, especially Zimbabwe.
	In 2001, the then vice-president of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games bid committee, Liu Jingmin, argued that:
	"By allowing Beijing to host the games you will help the development of human rights".
	As the House now debates China's record on human rights, that is surely the test against which we should judge China's performance.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, on initiating this debate. In a brilliant speech, he has highlighted many of the appalling human rights abuses perpetrated by the People's Republic of China, and your Lordships will find that there are many more examples described on the Amnesty International website. I intend to concentrate on another aspect of China's human rights record in my speech—the treatment of the 23 million citizens of its neighbouring country, Taiwan. In doing so, I declare an interest as co-chairman of the British-Taiwanese All-Party Parliamentary Group and as a visitor to that country on a number of occasions.
	Taiwanese human rights are being threatened in a number of ways. For example, there are around 1,000 missiles on the coast of China aimed directly at the heart of Taiwan. The Select Committee on Foreign Affairs in another place published an excellent report on east Asia in August 2006 that dealt with this subject. At paragraph 173, the committee said:
	"We conclude that the Chinese military build-up across the Taiwan Straits threatens peace and stability in East Asia ... We further conclude that the growth of democracy in Taiwan is of the greatest importance, both for the island itself and for the population of greater China, since it demonstrates incontrovertibly that Chinese people can develop democratic institutions and thrive under them".
	The PRC has backed up its threat of force with the passing of a so-called anti-secession law, which purports to give China the right to intervene militarily to force the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. There are other equally unsubtle attacks on the human rights of the people of Taiwan. China has campaigned, so far successfully, to ensure Taiwan's exclusion from world bodies such as the United Nations and the World Health Organisation. It demands that other countries deny Taiwan recognition and seeks to humiliate Taiwanese public figures by pressuring Governments around the world not to permit the fundamental rights of travel and free association.
	This might not matter so much if China was the only country to behave like that towards Taiwan, but sadly that is not the case, as we all know. Unfortunately, Her Majesty's Government appear as enthusiastic as any in support of the so-called One China policy. You get the flavour of this when you read the opening words of the FCO's country brief on Taiwan on its website:
	"The United Kingdom acknowledges the position of the Chinese Government that Taiwan is a province of China and recognises the Chinese Government as the sole legal government of China. The United Kingdom does not recognise Taiwan as a state and does not have diplomatic relations with Taiwan".
	The origin of this One China policy lies in the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when there were two Governments claiming to be the real Government of the whole of China: the Chinese nationalists, the Kuomintang, who went to Taipei in exile having lost the civil war, and the communist PRC Government of Mao Tse-Tung, who had won it. In terms of human rights, there was little to choose between them. Both operated a one-party dictatorship—parliamentary democracy was non-existent—and both relied heavily on martial law to preserve order. Not much has changed on the mainland since then, but the situation in Taiwan has been transformed. The FCO website describes Taiwan as,
	"a multi-party democracy with a directly elected President".
	This weekend there will be a legislative election and in March a new president will be elected.
	My noble friend will recall that he and I corresponded in September last year on the subject of Taiwan's applications to join the United Nations and the World Health Organisation. In his letter to me and to the co-chairman of the all-party Taiwan group, Sir Nicholas Winterton MP, my noble friend described Taiwan as,
	"a major Asian economy and vibrant democracy, and an important trade and investment partner for the UK. There are flourishing links in a wide range of areas, including business, education and culture. We wish to see these links continue to develop".
	Unfortunately, the tone of my noble friend's letter changed as it went on and he finished by saying:
	"We do not consider Taiwan's efforts to join the UN at this time to be helpful or conducive to stability in East Asia".
	A similar, but even harder, line was taken by the Foreign Secretary on 5 December. He told reporters that Britain did not support Taiwan's proposed referendum on UN membership and that,
	"any reckless manoeuvres are to be deplored".
	This is the first time that I have heard a referendum to obtain people's views on an important issue of policy described as a "reckless manoeuvre". I hope that the Prime Minister will resist the temptation—and pressure from the Chinese—to follow the same line when he visits Beijing next week.
	I compare this with the Government's position on Kosovo, where they rightly support the Ahtisaari proposals for Kosovan independence from Serbia. President Ahtisaari says that the new Kosovan constitution must be drafted and adopted by Kosovans and that Kosovo must have its own flag, seal and anthem, and the right to negotiate and conclude international agreements, including the right to seek membership of international organisations. My two questions are simple. First, if we are right to support Kosovan independence from Serbia, why do we refuse to support Taiwanese independence from China, based on similar principles? Secondly, what more must Taiwan do to demonstrate its credentials as a democratic state and as a friend of the United Kingdom?

Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I have chosen to speak on the role of China in Africa. I owe to an excellent Fahamu publication on China in Africa the following two quotations. The Sierra Leone ambassador in Beijing says:
	"The Chinese are doing more than the G8 in making poverty history. If a G8 country had wanted to rebuild the stadium, we'd still be holding meetings. The Chinese just come and do it. They don't hold meetings about environmental impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance. I'm not saying it's right, just the Chinese investment is succeeding because they don't set high benchmarks".
	My second quotation is from a Kenyan government spokesman, who described China as an easy country to do business with because,
	"the Chinese do not peg their economic activity or aid to political conditions ... You never hear the Chinese saying that they will not finish a project because the government has not done enough to tackle corruption. If they are going to build a road, then it will be built".
	Fahamu reports the African view—that of African environmentalists, technicians, political leaders, civil society, economists and human rights activists—on the impact of the Chinese presence in Africa. China never engaged in the slave trade and has no colonial past; on the contrary, it supported liberation movements, if only initially to counter Soviet influence. It has a pragmatic and non-conditional approach to investment and aid on the basis of equal to equal. It does not bother with human rights. African observers such as Moeletsi Mbeki are well aware that China deals with political leaders and is not interested in governance, investing where the need for its expanding industrial power can be met in oil, cobalt, precious metals, woods and other things. It creates some of the infrastructure that many countries need—mines, dams, electrical power—often bringing in Chinese to do the work rather than providing local employment. It accepts and uses the almost universal corruption that obtains among African leaders, and is not unknown in China, and has no tradition of deference to human rights.
	Others will speak of the situation in Sudan today, which epitomises China's policy of dealing with those in power to meet its need for oil and its readiness to sell arms and aircraft for use to subdue Sudan's own people. In earlier times the Chinese, building the pipeline to the Red Sea, were, like the Sudanese Government, wholly unconcerned by the displacement of thousands. They shared the views of, for instance, the Sudanese Government that any civil resistance to work conditions in Chinese enterprises must expect to be met with force, as it would have been in China. Equally, the threat to the environment from illegal logging and fishing does not concern them; the choice of dam sites on the Zambezi is determined by the economic and not by the environmental or human factors. We should be ready to help to recover for any free Zimbabwe Government that may eventually emerge any major assets that have been arbitrarily ceded to Chinese interests by ZANU-PF Ministers without due process.
	We must accept, as realistic African observers do, that, despite the Chinese policy of dealing with leaders who are mostly indifferent to the needs of their people, China is doing something—although in its own interests— for the infrastructure of the continent in dams, electrical projects and skilled people, and the Chinese presence on the ground is growing. The Sino-African partnership in the UN is becoming a powerful factor in determining international policy, not only in Africa. In Sudan, the UN is powerless; its mandate will be, as always, to observe but not to intervene.
	China is in Africa to stay and we have to live with that. If we are to help the peoples of Africa to benefit by the Chinese presence and to protect themselves from the onslaught on human rights, we should be doing all that we can to enable civil society to fight its own battles, both in securing good governance from often deplorable rulers and in acquiring the know-how to deal with the Chinese invasion with skill and expertise and to fight for human rights. The trade unions and women's movements should be strengthened. There should be more and better training in computer skills.
	Until China's record at home improves, it will be a waste of time, at least in the context of Africa, to attack the Chinese record on breaches of human rights, especially for so long as the African Union does not do so. HMG should not be afraid to attack corruption among African leaders, to refuse to support such men with unaccountable budgets from DfID or to allow China's appalling record to pass unnoticed. Not least, HMG should be restoring our diplomatic presence, which was withdrawn lately from some African countries. Men and women who understand and respect African thinking, including tribalism and African history, are far more valuable conduits to civil society than NGOs, however well meaning, the UN or the Word Bank. The Chinese are on the ground and we have to face that. I hope that our people will know enough not to say, "Kenya and Pakistan both have a heritage as British colonies". Pakistan was created by partition at the behest of Nehru and Jinnah in the last days of the British Raj, which was administered by the Indian Political Service. It was never a colony.
	The human rights record of China is awful beyond words, and that must be recognised and fought. I suggest that pragmatically we should be working out ways to enable the peoples—not the Governments—of the African countries to protect themselves, secure their human rights and not allow the Chinese habit of colluding with the Government of the day to use force. That should not pass unnoticed.
	I will end with one anecdote. In the last Zambian elections, someone who was canvassing against the Government was rightly extremely angry about the flooding of the country with cheap Chinese goods and much more about the conditions in the copper mines, where people were being brutally treated. When he was enlarging on this, the Chinese ambassador suggested that any more of this and China would withdraw its support if he were to be elected. I suppose that that is a very practical approach, but it is not one that one can regard with any kind of sympathy. I very much hope that HMG will fight in every possible way Chinese breaches of human rights. However, I recognise that China is a large, powerful and great country and we shall have to have very effective means of bringing our own views to bear on it. Personally, I think that China's own interests will eventually move in that direction, but I think that that will be a long time coming.

Lord Watson of Richmond: My Lords, I, too, congratulate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for having made this debate possible on a very important subject and at a critical phase. I should say right at the start that my remarks may strike a rather different note from the speeches that preceded mine. That is not because I do not recognise the civil rights and human rights abuses in China—I absolutely do, and I deplore them—but because I think it more important at this juncture to try and focus on the forces and motors for change in China and in Chinese policy and to try and see how those can be usefully assisted from our perspective.
	I visited Shanghai for the first time last November. I had been to China a good number of times but never to Shanghai. Like many people, including many noble Lords who have been to Shanghai, I was startled by the city's exuberance and the sheer momentum of what is going on there. It is very striking.
	I was, incidentally, pleased to see that the Bund on the riverfront is now protected. It gives the city, despite the skyscrapers, a really important and distinctive visual character. It also says something quite important about the international nature of Shanghai. I feel that there may be something in the Chinese scene whereby Shanghai plays a role slightly akin to that of St Petersburg in Russia. It is the international opening and a very important city in that context. It is certainly an important prism through which to view some of the issues in this debate on, "China's role in promoting and respecting human rights". Why? Shanghai demonstrates China's determination to make capitalism work for it. We may find that a strange and contradictory concept but it is the reality. The Chinese are not playing with capitalism; they want it to work and they believe that it is the essential method by which China's living standards will be raised. Secondly, it shows China's clear demonstration intention, Shanghai being such an international city, to be massively active as an investor, importer and exporter in global markets.
	Why are these factors so crucial for human rights and developments in human rights? It is because they are the motors of change, and change is what we need to see in Chinese civil society. We should never underestimate the rapidity of change. I was in Shanghai to lecture at the Shanghai International Studies University, which is one of the focus points in China for the acquisition of foreign languages. I would remind your Lordships that some 300 million people are studying English in China. The reason for that focus on the English language—which of course carries many values of civil society within the language—is their determination to succeed individually and collectively as part of a globalised economy.
	As for internal change and human rights in China, I think there has been one reference so far in the debate to China's membership of the WTO, which started in 2001—not all that long ago. Part of China's commitment in its acquisition of WTO membership was a commitment to,
	"establish a law-based society".
	It is important, in seeing where we go from this point, to understand the extent to which China's commercial and entrepreneurial ambition has as its concomitant a recognition of the need to create a civil society and a law-based society. I believe that there is clear evidence of recognition of the interconnection between those two things. While it is right that we condemn abuses, it is also important to encourage progress.
	Secondly, I believe that the involvement of the Communist Party in China in its entrepreneurial development—contradictory though we may find this—needs to be welcomed. The party congress in 2002 accepted entrepreneurs as party members in mainland China, and this has had a dramatic impact. More recently, we have seen increasing numbers of private companies in China establishing party committees as part of their management structure. We could arrive at a sinister explanation of those developments, but I would rather see the Communist Party of China described, as it was recently in the Financial Times, as the world's largest holding company than as the dictatorship of the proletariat.
	What of China's influence and role in promoting human rights? The point has already been vividly and powerfully made that China plays an increasingly important role as an investor in construction and an importer of raw materials. The figures are quite extraordinary. China is doubling its imports of minerals, oil and energy year on year. That has a paradoxical impact on us: whereas cheap products from China are, in price terms, deflationary in the West, the import of raw materials by China is now a very important inflationary force within the western economies.
	The fact is that China is playing a huge role as an investor and importer. There is great sensitivity in terms of the abuse of human rights—Zimbabwe has already been mentioned, as have Sudan and Darfur. China can and should—and we hope it will—use this influence positively. I sense that the Chinese authorities are aware of the importance of this dimension of foreign policy but they have not yet focused on it. The time has now arrived.
	We have seen in North Korea how very beneficial China's influence can be. Equally, we have been very disappointed by its lack of involvement in Burma.
	I end with two questions for the Minister. Will Her Majesty's Government continue to monitor and urge China's fulfilment of its WTO commitment to a law-based society? Will they make that a regular part of our agenda of dialogue with the Chinese Government? Secondly, will we use our ongoing bilateral and very intense dialogue with China—the forthcoming visit by the Prime Minister is a good example—to urge it, as a matter of its maturity and status in the international community, to use its influence for good where it makes major foreign investments? This will be important to China's status and credibility in the future.

The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for raising this issue at an opportune time. China knows that it has to speak the language of human rights if it is to become an international player.
	"The democracy and human rights of the people will be vigorously enhanced and safeguarded",
	are the words of Liu Jingmin of the Beijing Olympics organising committee.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, respect for human rights is an essential pillar of a free enterprise society, such as large sections of the Chinese population now aspire to, and some would say have always followed. Like individual freedom and the rule of law, it belongs to a process which ensures a healthy global economy.
	The Chinese leadership are well aware of the wider advantages; it is just that it does not currently suit their internal political ideology. They fear its consequences because any faster transformation to a freer society will require an end to discrimination against minorities, a fairer judicial system and a gradual move towards freedom of expression.
	The so-called minorities are in some cases sizeable nations. Tibet remains the outstanding example, but there is another persecuted people: the Uighurs in Xinjiang, western China—a vast Turkic Muslim minority of 10 million who have suffered similar treatment to the Tibetans over many years and are about to be outnumbered by the Han Chinese through colonisation, denying them their fair share of national mineral wealth. The Uighurs have stronger ethnic and historic links with their ex-Soviet neighbours and since 1949 there has been discrimination against them in every sphere: in employment, education, religion, even in marriage. State control of Islam in Xinjiang is well documented. There is a deliberate policy of suppression of religious activity, and mosques and religious practices are strictly controlled. On this test alone I would fail China as a proper host of the Olympic Games.
	Since 2001, with some Uighurs inevitably sympathising with Islamism and a few joining the Taliban, it has been easier for the Chinese to brand their more extreme Uighur critics as terrorists instead of separatists or counter-revolutionaries. The Uighur diaspora is now widespread. Many have fled across neighbouring borders, although there have been cases of refugees sent back from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Some migrate as far as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, or seek asylum in Sweden and the US. Twenty-three Uighurs from Pakistan ended up in Guantanamo. Some were moved to a better prison but only five have been released, ending up in an Albanian refugee camp.
	The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in 2006 reported some improvement in methods of treatment in Chinese prisons, but from a very low base. As my noble friend said, detainees are held for long periods without judicial control, which is a clear incentive for interrogators to obtain confessions through ill treatment. There is little external or independent monitoring and sentences, including the death penalty, are among the harshest in the world.
	I will quote a few examples which demonstrate China's paranoia about Uighur intellectuals and campaigners. The arrest of human rights activist Hu Jia in December is the latest sign of a pre-Olympic crackdown. One prominent writer still in prison is Nurmuhemmet Yasin, arrested in 2004. He and Korash Huseyin, editor of the Kashgar Literary Journal, were charged with writing and publishing a short story which was considered a critique of the Government's presence in Xinjiang. Huseyin was sentenced to three years in prison and is due to be released this year. Yasin, after a closed trial at which he was denied a lawyer, was sentenced to 10 years for,
	"inciting Uighur separatism".
	He is currently being held in Urumqi Jail and has been denied all visitors.
	Abdulghani Memetemin, another writer from Xinjiang, was arrested in 2002 after providing information to a pro-independence group abroad. He was convicted in Kashgar and sentenced to nine years. He was reportedly denied legal representation at his trial and has been tortured. I am grateful to International PEN for providing this information. Tao Haidong was arrested in 2002 just for posting articles on the internet and sentenced to seven years. Finally, Tohti Tunyaz is a historian in Urumqi Prison, arrested while working for a PhD in Uighur history and ethnic relations. He was sentenced in 2000 to 11 years for "stealing State secrets".
	Have the Government taken up any of these cases? At least they could inquire after the health of the family of Rebiya Kadeer, who was elected president of the World Uighur Congress last year. She is well known in Xinjiang as a business leader and a campaigner. She has met President Bush and, as the Minister will remember, last October she called at the Foreign Office. In 2000 she was sentenced to eight years for, among other things, sending her husband newspaper cuttings, and she spent five years in prison. She now lives in the US but her son Ablikim Abduriyim, aged 33, is in a serious state in a prison near Urumchi. He was tried in secret and is said to be seriously ill and injured following repeated beatings and ill treatment which many believe is partly in retribution for his mother's activities. According to Amnesty he has been denied medical treatment. This is surely a case we should be following closely.
	On 7 February we will enter the year of the rat. Those born during the year of the rat are said to be adaptable, clever, ambitious and industrious. The rat in the story came along on the back of the ox, jumping ahead at the last minute to win the race.
	The UK has been a standard-bearer of human rights and has encouraged free expression in many countries. To some extent, we may be holding back human rights in China in the name of subtle diplomacy. Let us hope we are not applying a different standard to China, as it is now such an important trading partner. We do not want to become spoilsports in the run up to the Olympics. I know that Her Majesty's Government will make their views felt through the human rights dialogue, but it is ironic that while the Olympic authorities are monitoring air pollution in China—and we must welcome the latest ban on plastic bags—there is, unfortunately, no monitoring of human rights.

Baroness Verma: My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, on this very important debate. While we recognise and celebrate the advances that China is making as an economic superpower, we must continue to assess and question China's role in promoting and respecting human rights, which we cannot ignore, even more so in light of its economic success. China has taken some steps in advancing its promotion of human rights, but there is no denying that China needs to go further in this area. I hope that the Minister will answer the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on whether the Chinese Government have indicated when it may ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Like my noble friend Lady Park of Monmouth, I would like to direct part of my speech to China's efforts in Africa.
	China has been a key supporter of Robert Mugabe, a man who has sparked political fury across the globe with his most questionable leadership in Zimbabwe. It has been only a few months since China dropped assistance to the Mugabe regime, but we are aware that it is still assisting with humanitarian aid, which remains a positive step, especially with China expressing its desire to work more closely with the international community.
	It was widely reported that, in the Minister's discussions with China last year, China expressed a wish to work more closely with the international community to bring peace to Darfur, particularly as previously it had been seen not to acknowledge the heartless policies of the Sudanese Government, who had continued to ignore the basic human rights of large parts of the Sudanese population. It appears that China is beginning to take its relationship with the African countries and with the international community more seriously; in particular, China has recognised that Zimbabwe is an out-of-control, failed state. In 2006, the GDP growth for China was 10.7 per cent, which has fuelled a rapid growth in tracking sources of oil in major oil-producing countries which pose high risks to inward investors, particularly when the rest of the world is reluctant to engage in contracts due to the challenging positions facing them when they choose to invest, particularly in Africa.
	China's investment in Sudan, Nigeria, Angola and the Republic of Congo, to name but a few, is, as reported, the reason for China's 40 per cent total growth in the demand for oil, with figures from reports claiming that Chinese companies had invested $175 million in the first 10 months of 2005 in African countries. Figures have suggested that China is taking up to 64 per cent of Sudan's oil exports, and we must remember that Sudan remains one of the world's poorest countries. While China continues to export oil out of Africa, the people of Africa remain poor, with the majority of Africans in abject poverty, corruption and suffering severe violations of their human rights.
	It is only right that we continue to monitor and assess the role that China is playing in Africa. It has been estimated that by 2045 China will depend on imported oil for 45 per cent of its energy needs. To ease the effect such trading has on Africa, experts have said that China has an aid-for-oil strategy, and with such limited time I feel that this is a debate to be had in its own right.
	As we see China striking deals with countries and Governments from across the globe, it is important that as an international leader it is aware of the destruction and violation of the human rights of the people in those countries where arms are traded in exchange for good oil prices. Equipping countries such as the Sudan, Zimbabwe and Nigeria, China is gaining strong political allies, succeeding in fulfilling political goals, but diverting attention from not addressing its own poor human rights record.
	China is a leading member of the global community and must be met with the same scrutiny that is given to the rest of the world. Before making some points about China and its people, I shall finish this part of my speech on China's relationship with Africa, because we must be aware that there have been some reported positive impacts on the economic growth of Africa, but let us not forget that the people who are not in power are the exploited masses in these international deals. The Africans are mainly cut out of jobs as China underbids local firms, but it can be argued that, where most global powers have not taken to being more practical in their help to rebuild many of the African countries, China has cashed in on such opportunities.
	The issue of the rights of people in China has been a long-standing debate but, with the successful bidding for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the eyes of the world are even more on China. I have recently read that the authorities have given permission to the police to hold and detain dozens of activists, outspoken intellectuals and human rights lawyers, including the arrest of Hu Jia—as mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich—reportedly one of the biggest targets for the authorities, as it was said that he had gathered and distributed information on the Government's human rights abuse. Is the Minister aware of such actions?
	When China won the bid to host the Games in 2001, it made a pledge to the world that it would take steps to improve its human rights record. One of the human rights issues that has come to the fore is the abuse of media freedom. On the rebuilding programmes going on in the run-up to the Games, it has been reported and seen that workers are being cheated out of wages and are working under dangerous conditions with no access to medical and accident insurance. With much redevelopment taking place, many local residents have been forced to move from their homes without compensation.
	In conclusion, while we see that China is making huge leaps in the global economy and positive impacts in Africa, it is important to assess China's role in promoting and respecting its own human rights record. With the Olympic Games taking place in Beijing we can see that China must play an active part in aiding its own people and serving them with the freedoms that they should be enjoying while the rest of the world comes to its door to celebrate the Games. Its relationship with Africa may be of economic fruitfulness, but we must not be blinded by the human rights violations that are still taking place within a rapidly expanding power.

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn: My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for raising this subject, both because it is important in its own right and because it helps us to put into context what is happening and to question what we might do positively to help. Coming near the end of the debate, there is no need to raise more individual questions of abuses of human rights in China. There are plenty of examples and I am sure that they are real ones.
	It is interesting to realise that recently at the Communist Party Congress at the end of October last year, the President of China, Hu Jintao, said that it was necessary to,
	"respect and safeguard human rights".
	One can question what that means in practice, but can one imagine 20 years ago the President of China saying that this should be an objective? Here, surely, is something that we can build on.
	The other part of the context, I suggest, is the massive internal development of China. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred very movingly to what Shanghai looks like. The same is true of Beijing and Guangzhou, or Canton. There is massive development. What we hear much less about is the enormous disparity of wealth between the countryside and the cities. Something like 50 per cent of China's wealth is in the control of something like 10 per cent of the population. Virtually all those people live in the cities. The influx of people from the countryside to the cities is absolutely enormous. It is estimated that there are something like 200 million migrant workers in the cities of China at the moment and that they will continue to move into the cities at a rate of 15 million per year, probably for the next 20 years. The conclusion is that governing China is no easy task for anybody.
	Other noble Lords have referred to another part of the context: the enormous economic growth of China over the past few years and its impact on China's role in the world. China is already the fourth largest economy in the world and the figures for 2007 will probably show China overtaking the UK to become the third largest. Inevitably, this dramatically affects China's position in the world and its relationship with other countries, including the UK. Recently, the very effective Chinese ambassador to London, Madame Fu Ying, came to Cambridge to address members of the university. She made a point of saying that the world tended to see China as an elephant, while those involved in formulating Chinese policies tended to see it as a mouse. The reason for this is that while the world sees China as huge, powerful and significant, the policymakers in China see instead all the problems that they face. I would not dare to pick certain animals from the Chinese zodiac, particularly not the next one on the calendar, which might be misunderstood, but a tiger is a better animal to choose than either an elephant or a mouse.
	The really important point is that now, inevitably, China is being drawn into discussion of key world issues in a way that has not been true in the past. Previously, China has been able to say that it does not involve itself in the internal affairs of other countries. That is no longer possible. As other noble Lords have said, China already plays a significant role and, in many places, a very positive role. Examples include North Korea and Iran on nuclear matters, and also Burma, to some extent. There is huge involvement in Africa. It must surely be our objective, picking up on what noble Lords have said, to make that as positive as possible. China is also involved in UN peacekeeping operations.
	In this context, we already have a widely based dialogue with China. That is something on which we can build. It is in that forum that one can and should raise the question of human rights as something that is important for its own sake and important for the economic development of China. Doing it in a much broader context means that one does not run into the danger—which there has been in the past—of China seeing these comments and criticism of its human rights record as antagonistic and, to put it crudely, as "China-bashing," and therefore disregard it. Put into a wider context it can be dealt with in a different way.
	To pick up on another point from the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Richmond, China has made enormous strides in the development of its legal system over the past 20 years. Of course, there is still a long way to go. The Chinese leaders recognise that. At the Communist Party Congress last October, President Hu Jintao spoke of the importance of the rule of law as "a fundamental principle". We in the UK have helped in the past with the training of Chinese lawyers and judges. A lot of this has been done through the British Council. Some of it, interestingly, has been done in Scotland, because the Roman law basis of the Scottish legal system is often easier for the Chinese to latch onto than the common law tradition in England. A lot has been done, and I am sure that a lot more could be done.
	In conclusion, I ask the Minister, first, to tell us something about the wider context of our discussions with China on a broad range of international issues and how the human rights issue could be inserted into them, and, secondly, what the British Government think that they can go on doing to help the Chinese to help themselves to develop a sound rule of law, both for China's own sake and because that is, after all, a key element in helping to improve a record of human rights.

Lord Moynihan: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for introducing this debate. I declare my interests as chairman of the British Olympic Association, a director of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and a member of the Olympic board for the Olympics to be held here in London in 2012. The subject of my speech will come as little surprise to noble Lords this evening. I have also sustained a strong personal interest in foreign affairs and human rights, two subjects which dominated the years during which I had the honour and good fortune to sit on the Front Bench as senior foreign affairs spokesman for my party, a humble predecessor to the eminent current incumbent, my noble friend Lord Howell.
	Many noble Lords have referred to the problematic nature of China's human rights record and, indeed, that of a number of other countries in the region. Noble Lords have referred to breaches in human rights which are clearly unacceptable in the 21st century. Every part of the international community must strive to do what it can to move the issue forward. I am also sure that we all recognise the sensitivities associated with taking the Olympic Games to China at this time.
	I strongly support the stance of the International Olympic Committee that the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games should and will go ahead in Beijing. I also share the view of Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, that there is a real chance that we will see a positive impact on China's human rights as a result. However, neither the Olympic movement nor, indeed, anyone should expect the 2008 Olympic Games alone to bring China into line with international human rights standards. Expectations of an Olympics-led metamorphosis are simply unrealistic. Real change requires consolidation of the position of China's domestic reformers and a wider public recognition of human rights. It would not be unusual for this to take many more years—in effect, another generation. Indeed, one of the major challenges will be how the momentum for change will be sustained after the curtain comes down on the Games in Beijing. Nor can, or should, the International Olympic Committee be expected to solve a problem to which the Governments of the international community have yet to find an answer.
	At the same time, it would be wrong to underestimate the growing national influence of sport and the power of the Olympic movement. For just as China's human rights record fits uneasily with the Olympic ideals, so too does the idea that sport can harbour prejudice, geographical or otherwise. The goal of Olympism is to spread fundamental human values as widely as possible and not to confine them exclusively to the western world, as we tended to do in the 20th century. Sport is about humanity.
	An argument for why the 2008 Summer Olympics should be held in Beijing is that sport in itself is a force for good. It is a mass phenomenon which gives enjoyment to hundreds of millions of people every week. We have gone far beyond the principle of the value of sport as simply entertainment. That has been recognised, not least in the 1978 International Charter of Physical Education and Sport, which places the development of physical education and sport at the service of human progress. Sport has a role to play in society. At all levels, it is influential and pervasive. By their very nature, sport and physical education are about participation, inclusion and a sense of belonging. Sport, as a universal language, can help to promote peace, tolerance, reconciliation and understanding. It cuts across lines of class, nationhood, ethnicity and culture that might otherwise divide, and it is an exceptional vehicle for bringing people together, bridging differences and promoting communication and understanding.
	For example, sport has helped reinitiate dialogue where other channels have struggled. A tradition of such sports diplomacy has certainly played its part in Asia. North and South Korea promoted reconciliation by merging their athletes into a common team for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Table tennis set the stage for the resumption of diplomatic ties between China and the United States in 1971. Elsewhere, Israeli and Palestinian children regularly come together to play soccer or basketball. If anyone doubted the extraordinary power of sport, they would have to look no further than last year's Asian Football Cup. In Iraq, riven by sectarian violence and turmoil, there are few rays of hope. Yet Shia, Sunni and Kurdish players made up the Iraqi team and, putting aside the differences that separate them in their own country, they came together as one team to win the Asian Football Cup. The uplift to the Iraqi people as a result of that victory of their national team stands as a testament to what sport can do to bring people together.
	Despite this evidence, we have heard some calls for a boycott of the Games, not least from Edward Macmillan-Scott, a member of my own party in the European Parliament. I recognise that boycotts can in some cases be successful, but not in this case. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, rightly argued, China is at an important stage in its development. As a nation, it will also play a key role in all of our futures. We need to help open up China to the rest of the world, to integrate and to cultivate relationships, to shine a spotlight, as the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, has done today, on the issues which concern us, and to work together to encourage resolutions. It is incumbent on all of us involved with the Olympic movement to play our role in this. It is also incumbent on those involved with the IOC fully to engage with all the issues of a host nation in order to ensure that the principles of Olympism and the Olympic ideals are promulgated as effectively and as widely as possible. Human rights, educational programmes and environmental matters are all on the agenda of those whose lives are impacted by sport, and indeed the IOC. As I was leaving the IOC headquarters in Lausanne only last month, I was passed by three members representing a human rights group, drawn from a demonstration outside, who were welcomed into discussion with IOC executives.
	We should not forget the progress which has been made since Beijing was awarded the Games, a direct consequence of the strength of the sports movement to which I have referred. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, acknowledged in his speech, foreign journalists are, for the first time, welcomed without restriction. Amnesty International has recognised that positive steps have been taken in relation to the death penalty and to police brutality, while rightly continuing to focus on cases of human rights violations which have never before in history been under such a strong global spotlight of media, political and public attention—and never would have been had the Games gone elsewhere.
	In conclusion, the IOC has created a serious momentum for change by deciding to stage the Olympic Games in Beijing, a momentum that could generate pressure on the Chinese regime to change its behaviour and, at the very least, accelerate the process of instituting long-term reforms. Amidst concerns that this will not pay off, it is worth remembering that there would not have been the recent Chinese promises to improve human rights and press freedoms that we have heard about, fulfilled or not, without the Beijing Olympics. Beijing 2008 has pushed China's human rights record to the top of the international agenda for the next eight months. The challenge for politicians, human rights groups, the Chinese Government and the IOC is to work together to make the wisest use of this opportunity, to ensure that fundamental human rights are treated with a new-found respect in China. This is, after all, a fundamental goal of the Olympic movement.

Lord Avebury: My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for enabling us to have this debate at such a topical moment and for allowing us to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. We have missed him over the last few years and we are pleased to hear his contribution to this debate and his optimism about the effect that the Olympic Games may have on human rights in China. Nobody expects to wave a magic wand over China and suddenly institute a regime of complete human rights instantly. We recognise that it is a question of a whole generation, but the fact that a start is now being made is a hopeful sign.
	The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said in the debate on the gracious Speech last November that China's huge and continuing economic success is by no means the only reason why its presence on the world stage is so important. He drew attention to the remarkable success of our agreement with China on Hong Kong as an indication of China's reliability as a partner in international agreements, to China's support for UNSCR 1769 on Darfur and to the visit by the UN special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, to Burma in October, as examples of China's increasing involvement in the solution of major problems on the UN's humanitarian and peacekeeping agendas. As has also been mentioned, the return of North Korea to the six-party talks on non-proliferation just after that debate was also attributed largely to Chinese diplomacy. China's involvement in key world issues was underlined again today by the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Tillyorn.
	It is common ground that in a few years China not only will have become the greatest economic power in the world but may also have assumed a much greater share of responsibility for upholding standards of governance, human rights and the rule of law that hitherto have been led by the West, through the motors of change referred to by my noble friend. It will be natural for China to develop those standards within its own borders and to promote them internationally, if only for reasons of self-interest. Several noble Lords mentioned Zimbabwe. The massive Chinese investment there and in other countries in Africa can be protected only if it is embedded in ordinary societies where people have rights protected by the Government and the rule of law. It is welcome that China has signed up to the six major human rights treaties—although it has still to ratify the ICCPR—and has thus acknowledged them as the yardsticks that need to be applied both at home and abroad.
	Where China falls short of complying with those obligations domestically, it is not very likely that it will promote them abroad. Amnesty International has provided us with a useful checklist. There is some progress. As has been mentioned, fewer death penalties are being imposed. Some restrictions on foreign journalists were lifted at the start of 2007, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, mentioned, but Reporters Without Borders says that since then it has received 180 reports of threats, physical violence, harassment, destruction of equipment, interrogation and visa refusals. In the run-up to the Olympic Games, that simply will not do, nor will the jamming of the BBC's Mandarin broadcast, which has also been mentioned. I should like to know what the Minister thinks we can do about that before the Olympic Games begin.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, the next round of UK-China dialogue is at the end of this month. It would be useful to know from the Minister what is to be discussed and what assessment the Government have made of progress over the year. The FCO's human rights report for 2006 contains a useful summary of the points raised at that dialogue meeting, but what is always lacking is a picture of the effects of all the dialogue over the longer term and how they match up with the reports in the UN Human Rights Special Procedures.
	I suggest that there should be a single web portal that gives access to all the information available on the dialogues—ours, those of the European Union, those of the Americans, and so on—with links not only to the related material on Foreign Office websites but to the site of the reports of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, pointing the way to better co-ordination than we have at the moment on those processes. I know that there are periodic meetings of the dialogue partners, but one would like to see how that works and how the special procedures are fed into those discussions.
	Let me give an example. The UN Rapporteur for Religious Freedom visited China in 1994 and made a series of recommendations, which could be used as the benchmarks proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, to measure the achievements of the dialogues. The FCO report says that no progress has been made on religious freedom, a key issue that was apparently raised without results at the EU-China dialogue last October. We have asked the Chinese to confirm when the UN rapporteur would be allowed to make a visit to follow up the 1994 recommendations and the Minister could perhaps say whether any answer to that has been received.
	The issues of the gratuitous prohibition of the Falun Gong and the ill treatment of its adherents, as well as the relentless persecution of monks and nuns in Tibet, are taken up by Ministers, I know, at every opportunity and one hopes that these matters will be raised at the dialogue. The talks between the Chinese Government and representatives of His Holiness the Dalai Lama are useful but, since the sixth round last July, the ball has been in the Chinese court to name the date and place for the next meeting. Meanwhile, the railway link to Lhasa has stimulated even higher rates of Chinese emigration, accelerating and undermining Tibetan cultural and spiritual identity, and, as the noble Lord knows, last September a regulation was passed providing that all lamas have to be approved by the Chinese authorities. If Beijing is playing for time, expecting that in a few years it will have extinguished Tibetan Buddhism, it is making a mistake, because the Dalai Lama is the spiritual head of a belief system that has a growing number of followers all over the world. This is the point where domestic human rights intercept with China's foreign policy, as obviously China is not going to be tough on the Burmese junta over the killings and arrests of monks and the closure of monasteries during the recent uprising when similar violations have been perpetrated in Tibet.
	This debate has been far too short to cover more than a fraction of the issues raised by the noble Lord's question, but clearly there is a strong demand across the House for the Government to seize the opportunity provided by the Beijing Olympics to increase the persuasion that they already apply for China to address human rights problems. I hope that in doing so they will keep Parliament fully informed and involved.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, we are all very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for raising this crucial issue and as usual we have heard a number of extremely expert views. For instance, the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, played a major part in preparing for the successful transfer of sovereignty in Hong Kong and probably knows more than almost anyone in this House or elsewhere about dealing with the Chinese people and their aspirations.
	The conundrum about Britain and China is easily summed up. We want a strong relationship with China and all its peoples but we do not like some of the brutal methods employed in China today. The facts stare us in the face that China now already produces 16 per cent of the world's gross domestic product. That figure is measured in purchasing power parity terms and it is heading much higher. Last year China exported over $1 trillion of goods to the western world. We have a dilemma between what we like and do not like, and we try to bridge the gap by hoping that economic freedom will eventually lead to political freedom; by hoping that opening to world trade will lead to higher standards; by arguing, as my noble friend Lord Moynihan did with great eloquence and expertise, that sport and the Olympic Games' spotlight will bring liberalisation, as I believe it may well do; and by hoping that the information revolution and the world wide web will mean less state dominance and more power dispersal from the centre. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, began by reminding us, that is going rather slowly when all the major search engines are collaborating with the repressive instincts in the Chinese Government. Above all we hope that China will change in line with the general patterns of global development, and it probably will, although in ways and patterns which will continue to baffle western political and economic theorists and not fit in with the kind of models and theories with which we are familiar in the western world.
	On the good side it needs to be said that although there are many aspects we thoroughly dislike, let us at least remember—and we have been reminded in this debate—that the Chinese Government are free of some of our own flaws and weaknesses in the West, such as the idiocies of multiculturalism and the fallacies in some of our aid policies, and that they have lifted 400 million people out of poverty through sheer enterprise and energy, leaving hundreds of millions more, as the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, reminded us, still in the countryside and crowding into the towns. Nevertheless, this is progress and it cannot be denied.
	Technology is moving ahead very fast. Earlier, we talked about developing our nuclear power programme. In the end, we may have to borrow from Chinese technology to restart our own civil nuclear programme in an effective way. If there are any doubts about the huge shift in wealth and political power now taking place towards China and the other Asian countries—indeed, to the whole Shanghai Co-operation Group—just to take a rather trivial example, I read in the newspaper this morning that China is the most favoured destination for exporting Rolls-Royce motor cars. Last year, sales to China increased by 50 per cent, which is evidence that something—maybe not the right thing—is certainly going on in that market, a market that we have to be in.
	Of course, we do not want just markets from China, but responsibility and a measured weight in world affairs. We need China to be a force for stability in Africa, in central Asia, in Iran and in the Middle East. We want, indeed advise, those in China who will listen to us to adopt a less confrontational and more embracing approach to Taiwan, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, rightly reminded us. The idea that it will embrace the future Taiwan by firing rockets at it and mobilising military forces on the mainland is completely the wrong approach.
	I was especially struck too by the comments made by my noble friend Lady Park, which are always deeply perceptive. She is right to say that we must make sure that in Africa human rights are upheld, and that we point out to both the Chinese and the African people the benefits of pursuing the rule of law and upholding human rights. But we have to face a fact, which was encapsulated the other day in the rather disastrous EU-Africa meeting in Lisbon when one of the African leaders said, "It is all very well lecturing us on human rights, but the plain fact is that you can buy two Chinese cars for one European car". That is the hard currency of the situation. If China can bring immediate, in-the-pocket benefits, it will prove to be a very attractive visitor and is beginning to exert an enormous influence, so that everywhere one goes in Africa now one sees signs of buildings and infrastructure labelled with Chinese symbols. That is what we are up against.
	My right honourable friend David Cameron, the leader of my party, was in Chongqing recently, where he made a very interesting comment at the university, which I have no hesitation in repeating. Addressing a Chinese audience, he said:
	"As your star rises once more in the world, so does the size of your stake in preserving global security and stability. This is partly a question of self-interest. Today, you are the world's third biggest importer of oil",
	as we know,
	"and ten per cent of it comes from Sudan. So China has a direct national interest in working for stability in Sudan, and an end to the killings in Darfur".
	He went on to point out that:
	"China has a direct interest too in making sure Zimbabwe",
	is not worse, but a more "sustainable and brighter" place for the future, as my noble friend Lady Verma rightly emphasised. He also pointed out that China should play a really responsible part in helping to,
	"resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis, because the proliferation of nuclear material endangers lives in Nanjing as much as it does in New York".
	He urged China to,
	"deliver and reward good governance in Africa, because",
	successful Chinese,
	"investment in that continent depends on stability and progress".
	That is the language of talking direct to Chinese interests and Chinese realism, which is beginning to have some effect, as many of those participating in this debate have rightly said.
	In the end, the message we need to send to China—not as lecturers from some superior moral position but as practical friends who want China to succeed and prosper—is that more humane practices and a much deeper respect for human rights will benefit the Chinese people, as the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, rightly indicated, and will enable China to play its full, rightful and responsible role in world affairs in the 21stcentury. That is what we all want to see.

Lord Malloch-Brown: My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on proposing this debate. His interest in the subject reflects his overall commitment to human rights, for which I think we all commend him.
	This has been a typically interesting and thoughtful debate in which we all to a greater or lesser extent share the arguments made by the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Wilson. Having come to China first as an expert on development rather than on human rights, I have always had to take into account the fact that China ranks in about the middle of the list in the UNDP Human Development Report. Although it scores poorly on the political criteria, it continues to score way above its per capita income level in terms of the economic and social criteria because of the improvements in life that it has created by lifting so many hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Yet if one looks at the more purely political league tables of human rights freedoms and political freedoms more generally—that of Reporters Without Borders, which has been mentioned, or of Freedom House—one finds China near the bottom of the list. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred to this dilemma. We are in a sense investing in the idea that if China continues to enjoy strong economic progress, it will translate into greater political liberalisation.
	For those who make that case, such as on the Olympics, there is a precedent. I would argue that China's accession to the World Trade Organisation was a step change in many areas of internal freedom and in the introduction of at least pluralistic economic competitiveness into the Chinese economy. We hope, similarly, that the hosting of the Olympics will be another step change; not a temporary aberration where freedom is granted and then taken away but a process of locking in a greater degree of press and other freedoms.
	Similarly for those of us who believe that the way forward on human rights is through engagement with China and through China's economic and social success, we also make the case about the need to think of the alternative. If disengagement led to lower growth rates in China, think of the appalling challenges that it would pose to such a large country, with such rising aspirations and expectations among its people for a better life. After all, China comprises between one-fifth and one-sixth of the world's population, so its fortunes impact directly on all of us, not just because of the trade and consumer goods that it provides us but because China's environmental performance, its role as a consumer of the world's natural resources and its role in global security are of direct interest to us. We require a partnership and a dialogue to help China manage its way through these daunting challenges of development and modernisation in a way that improves human rights as well as its performance on the other criteria. I would certainly make the case—I did not hear that much dissent from it in the debate—that however one balances the disappointing human rights record against the successes in other areas, the only way forward is engagement.
	China's stability is vitally important both for us and for global growth more generally. President Hu is committed to doing more to address the growing disparities affecting his country, and that is a commitment we wholeheartedly welcome. It has a value in terms of China's record on economic and social rights that we sometimes underestimate. After all, there are two covenants on human rights; there is not only the civil and political covenant, but also the social and economic one. Since the reforms of 1978, China has lifted perhaps as many as 500 million people out of poverty. We need to applaud that and work to see how we can build further on it.
	We want China to be a stable power so that it can play an increasing role in the global political system. That is because with the role comes the responsibilities associated with being a global stakeholder, as Bob Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has described it. Through exercising its influence responsibly, China can be a real force for good from Darfur to Kosovo, Iran to North Korea, and Burma to Afghanistan. Indeed, there has been some limited—I acknowledge that—progress on this. For example, China is now one of the largest contributors of personnel to UN peacekeeping operations of any P5 member. Chinese engineers are working in the Middle East, as well as a battalion of engineers embarked for Darfur. More recently, China voted in favour of important UN Security Council resolutions and supported what was for it difficult statements on issues such as Darfur and Burma, and as has been said, China facilitated the visit of the UN envoy to Burma last year.
	Further, while I acknowledge that there are two points of view on this, China's role in Africa is nevertheless very significant. At the time of my visit to Beijing last summer, in conversation with me the envoy to Africa announced that indeed China would now limit its support to Zimbabwe to humanitarian assistance and that it recognised that it was no longer a plausible development partner. On Darfur, it has been China's pressure which, while at times perhaps it was not as strong as we would have wished, none the less allowed us last July to pass a Security Council resolution at 15 votes to zero in order to bring forward the deployment of UNAMID and see the beginnings of political negotiations between the two sides.
	Finally, I turn to the issue of China's investment in the infrastructure of Africa. Speaking as an old development man, while I recognise that the Chinese are like a new donor who needs to learn how the issues of environmental and social standards as well as good governance are critical to development outcomes, nevertheless for Africa, which for years was asking us for investment into the critical infrastructure of roads and power to allow it to compete in the global economy, it was China which heard that call. I regret that we in the West did not come forward with similar amounts of development assistance. So, yes, we can make the case for the ways in which the Chinese can improve how they deliver that assistance, but we should not fall into the trap of looking, in this case, an aid gift horse in the mouth.
	Domestically, we believe that China could do more progressively to build a stronger rule of law, much greater freedom of information and association, and, over time, we hope, a pluralistic political system. That is critical if China is to equip itself with the checks and balances needed to let the pressure out of the steam cooker of dealing with public discontent. If people are not to riot and protest then, as we have seen in country after country, they must be granted the means of expressing themselves peacefully in politics. So we will go on pressing for a trajectory of Chinese reforms that do not cover only economic and social issues, but touch also on the political. It is against that backdrop that I would like to turn to the specific human rights issues raised today. Obviously it will not be possible to deal with every case, so I shall be happy to come back to noble Lords after the debate who want more information on particular cases.
	First, let us acknowledge that ordinary Chinese people are now at much greater liberty to choose where they live and work and have greater rights to travel abroad. With this greater openness comes a greater exposure to other people's ideas and cultures. China's burgeoning economy offers them new choices and opportunities.
	Institutional progress is often ignored, but there are developments in China's legislative framework to provide greater protection for the rights of its citizens. The new labour law, which came into force on 1 January, is a good example. Of course there are difficulties of full implementation in a country the size of China, where there are still restrictions on some forms of public organisation. Nevertheless, on issue after issue, we are seeing greater recourse to legal remedies, a greater demand by the Government for improvements in how the judiciary operates and greater use by citizens of legal redress when they feel that their rights have been abused. On the rule of law, we consider that the use of house arrest, of re-education through labour and of extrajudicial forms of detention remain serious problems and we continue to urge the Chinese to be more transparent. But we also see progress.
	Freedom of the media is still a significant problem. The new media regulations, put in place in January 2007, provide greater freedom for foreign journalists to travel around the country, but they are due to expire in October, after the Olympics, and do not, as has been pointed out, apply to domestic journalists. As has been said, the BBC Mandarin service is being blocked, an issue that we have raised with the Chinese authorities and about which we are in discussion with the BBC.
	We are all aware of the difficult issues around Tibet. The death penalty in China has also been mentioned and, while its use seems to be declining, we still lack sufficiently reliable data to be confident of how far the number of executions has really fallen. Freedom of religion has properly been mentioned by many noble Lords today and we share the great concern about it.
	On the one-child policy, when I heard the noble Lord refer to the fact that China is the only country where by law you cannot have a brother or sister, I thought that my squabbling children would all apply to move there. But behind the policy lies a profound and dangerous social situation. The consequences for family life and the structure of the country were by no means fully understood when the policy was adopted. I fear that we will live with the consequences for some time. Let me assure the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that moneys given to UNFPA are not used for coercive family planning; there has been much insistence by UNFPA that its moneys are used for policies that do not breach human rights.
	Specific cases were mentioned. I visited China last August and, again, I can say that the cases of Chen Guangchen and that of his wife, Yuan Weijing, who at that time had just been stopped from travelling, have been raised by me and by others. The case of the children of Rebiya Kadeer has been raised. My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary discussed human rights with his Chinese counterpart during the latter's visit here in December. He again raised Chen Guangchen's case, as well as those of Gao Zhisheng and Rongye Adak. We received responses to our requests for information just last Friday—4 January—with information on the welfare and whereabouts of many of those whose cases we had raised.
	My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary and I also discussed with our Chinese interlocutors the prospects of Chinese ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We are disappointed that the Chinese Government remain reluctant to commit to a timetable for ratification and we urge them to do so. It has been noted that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister will visit China later this month. He, too, will raise the issue of human rights and, shortly after his visit, we will hold the 16th round of the UK-China human rights dialogue, which will look in great depth at progress and at the challenges ahead. There is, as has been mentioned, a similar European Union dialogue in which we also participate.
	In closing, I acknowledge that the Prime Minister will raise lots of other things in addition to human rights. He will raise our growing links in the financial, commercial, environmental, political, research, cultural and sporting areas. We host the Olympics in sequence with each other, and we will have a lot to learn from each other. We hope to be a kind of financial back office for China as its role in the world grows. We hope to partner with China to find solutions to its environmental difficulties. We have made great progress in that. The dialogue with China is rich and important and it must continue on all fronts, but it is critical that central to it—and something that we are never embarrassed about raising—is the role of human rights in China's development.

House adjourned at 6.25 pm.